A Girl in Winter

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Faber & Faber, Oct 4, 2012 - Fiction - 263 pages

Lose yourself in this tale of young love by the 'best-loved English poet of the past 100 years.' ( Sunday Times)
Katherine Lind is a refugee who has become a librarian in a wartime Northern town. One winter's day, she receives a telegram: and her thoughts drift back to falling in love with her pen-pal, Robin Fennel, on a glorious summer exchange. But on his return from the army, their reunion is not what they imagined ...
'Beautiful.' Nina Stibbe
'Remarkable . Diffused poetry.' Simon Garfield
'Highly sensitive . Reminiscent of Virginia Woolf.' Joyce Carol Oates
'Funny and profoundly sad.' Andrew Motion
'Strange and beautiful ... Short, intense and obsessed with the tiny ballets of social interaction, they could only have been written by someone very young (the writer they most remind me of is Sally Rooney) ... Weird but brilliant ... Zingily contemporary.' Sunday Times

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About the author (2012)

Philip Larkin was an English novelist, librarian and celebrated poet, who has been awarded numerous honours including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in Coventry in 1922, he was educated at King Henry VIII School and Oxford University. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), as well as two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Library and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. Larkin worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. In 2003, he was chosen as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years by a Poetry Book Society Survey; in 2008, The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer; and in 2016, a memorial was unveiled at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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