Winter Shadows: A Novel

The rise of email and the internet. The siege of Sarajevo. The explosion of camera surveillance. The early 1990’s brings us issues and images that continue to define our world. In February 1994, three people living in New York are caught up in these changes and their lives become entwined with them.A former English professor who has taken refuge as a custodian to escape the increasing alienation of professional life. An editor at a New York magazine chasing her own dream of success—at the expense of being chased by it. A refugee who has escaped the siege of Sarajevo, standing caught between the nightmare of the war he has left and the lyric dream of comfort he finds in the U.S.The three are brought together through a picket line organized by security guards who have just lost their jobs to a firm that replaces guards with camera surveillance. The building the guards have chosen to picket is the editor's, and she must cross the picket line every day to get to work. The custodian has decided to join the picketers in sympathy with their plight and their struggle against the technology that has replaced them. The refugee has been asked by a local newspaper to cover the picket. What happens to them over the next couple of weeks will change their lives.Winter Shadows follows the role images and dreams play in contemporary life as they are woven into our concerns with success, alienation, and violence. It asks the question of whether the dreams the novel's characters—and the rest of us—chase are the stuff of our world or merely shadows in winter. Read more