KATHLEEN WINTER is the author of the international bestseller, Annabel, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, and CBC’s Canada Reads. Her first collection of stories, boys, won both the Winterset Award and the Metcalf–Rooke Award. A long-time resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, she now lives in Montreal.

The Montreal-based Winter, a native of Newfoundland, possesses a rare blend of lyrical brilliance, descriptive power and psychological and philosophical insight...A compelling, gracefully written novel about mixed gender that sheds insight as surely as it rejects sensationalism. This book announces the arrival of a major writer. - Kirkus Reviews

...a sprawling book filled with musical prose... - Emily Landau, The Walrus

[Kathleen Winter's] lyrical voice and her crystalline landscape are enchanting. - Sally Law, New Yorker

Reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides' magnificent 2002 novel Middlesex, Winter's treatment of such a delicate issue is amazing and incredibly engaging. Her novel is written with immense sensitivity and grace, not to be missed. - Jim Piechota, Bay Area Reporter

Read it because it's a story told with sensitivity to language that compels to the last page, and read it because it asks the most existential of questions. Stripped of the trappings of gender, [Kathleen] Winter asks, what are we? - Globe and Mail

. . . utterly original . . . a haunting story of family, identity, and the universal yearning to belong. - O Magazine

Annabel's strength lies in probing the dilemma of sexuality and self-knowledge. I have never read such an intimate portrait of a person struggling to live inside a self that the world sees as a dreadful mistake. - National Post

Annabel is a stunning and stirring debut that signals the long-overdue arrival of a literary talent. - Halifax Chronicle Herald

Annabel is an unforgettable novel of struggles, personal and inter-personal, and Winter's empathetic voice does them justice in a way that connects reader to story. Destined to be one of the biggest novels out of Newfoundland this year, this is a story of isolation and a communication breakdown that breaks a family down, and breaks the reader down along with them. - Chad Pelley, St. John's Telegram

A book like this, its topic and beautiful language, the unrelenting sorrow, Winter's insightful characterizations and utter sensitivity, is difficult to do justice to with these few words. I simply want to tell people: read this book. Read it though you know little or nothing about its subject or the author. It will open you up. It will change you. - Ottawa Citizen

. . . Annabel is a novel about divisions, not only between the sexes but also between social classes and, perhaps most crucially, ways of being . . . Winter does a deft job of developing all the characters fully and making their motives understandable . . . It's to Winter's credit that both the fear and the beauty are given vivid expression in this finely crafted novel. - Barbara Carey, Toronto Star

. . . a poignant and powerful first novel . . . - Donna Bailey Nurse, Montreal Gazette

This is a remarkable first novel, an accomplished debut by an exciting new voice with a confident, mature style. - Vanessa Berridge, Daily Express

. . . beautifully paced, sometimes shocking and never prurient. - Maggie Fergusson, Intelligent Life Magazine

Winter's dazzling debut addresses the riddle of gender and the tragedy of conformity with astonishing insight and eloquence. - Richard Labonte, Gay Calgary and Edmonton Magazine

. . . a confident, serious debut. - Carrie O'Grady, Guardian

. . . a captivating romantic novel with a happy ending. - Jim Taylor, Canadian Literature

...a stunning novel, one of the rare kind that might well imbed itself permanently in a reader's psyche. - Rosalie MacEachern, New Glasgow News