The unusual love story of Shira Nayman's A Mind of Winter shows us a sophisticated view of romantic love's inherent smallness in the shadow of war. Featuring unforgettable characters in varying states of decline and debasement, the novel depicts a level of human damage caused by the smoldering ruin of Europe after the Second World War for which not even the most ostentatiously pastoral revelry of postwar-America could provide respite.
Working back and forth in time and spanning continents, Nayman gradually builds a story of two lovers, Christine and Robert, split for mysterious (yet obviously scarring) reasons during the Blitz. Christine turns up later in Shanghai on a vividly drawn self-destructive tear involving opium dens and brothels. Meanwhile, wealthy Oscar holds court at his estate in the Hamptons with a collection of interesting, semi-permanent party guests. One of his guests, Marilyn, a war photographer who adores her husband, is unmoored by the memories of what she saw through her camera and recklessly embarks on an ill-fated affair with the world-weary Barnaby. Finding a kindred soul in his guest's disaffectedness, the ostensibly British Oscar befriends Marilyn--and we learn what has become of Christine and Robert.
Nayman's pacing is tantalizingly opaque; where the story and its entrancing characters are going is never quite clear until the end. That end brings a satisfying closure, but the sensation of how these characters are hounded by the echo of war is distinctly unsettling. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic