The Winter Vault (2009)

"When ground is too frozen for the digging of graves, said Lucjan, the dead wait in these winter vaults... The winter dead wait, said Lucjan, for the earth to relent and receive them. They wait, in histories of thousands of pages, where the word love is never mentioned."

Anne Michael's The Winter Vault is a story about dismantling and recreating and what is lost forever in between. It centres on Avery and Jean, a Canadian couple who travel to Egypt so that he can participate in the relocation of the temple at Abu Simbel. While in Egypt the couple suffers a devastating loss, one which is compounded by the psychological impact of the relocation project, how the act of taking the temple apart has corrupted its beauty, and how the dislocation of farmers living along the Nile has devastated those communities. The marriage is broken by these events, though not irreparably, and on their return to Canada, Avery and Jean separate and begin drifting. Jean becomes involved with Lucjan, a Polish artist who has his own tales of loss and suffering, but her love for Avery is not quite dead, it's simply waiting to be rediscovered and reconstructed.

Michaels, a celebrated poet before publishing her debut novel, the great Fugitive Pieces, has a dreamy style that blurs the line between the characters' interior and exterior lives. The story flows easily through different time periods and locations - in addition to their time in Egypt and their separate lives afterwards, the novel also explores the beginning of Avery and Jean's relationship and some of their lives before meeting; it also spends a great deal of time with Lucjan in war torn Poland - and between character perspectives. Jean ends up carrying the bulk of the narrative, but Avery, Lucjan, and several supporting characters including Avery's mother and Lucjan's group of Polish expat friends, are all drawn with clarity and compassion.

Michaels' style is engaging and passages of The Winter Vault are achingly beautiful and profound. That being said, however, the language does sometimes get a little too densely poetic. This doesn't happen frequently, but there are passages where it reads like there's one brush stroke too many. For the most part, though, The Winter Vault is a beautiful and intensely readable novel.

Annabel (2010)

"After the operation, Wayne felt the power of names in a new way. His father ate his evening toast, sometimes with a kipper. Jacinta crocheted. They did not look outside at the night. Wayne tried to remember a time before he knew the word for sky. You explained away the mystery of the night, he thought, by naming its parts: darkness, Little Dipper, silver birch."

Kathleen Winter's Annabel is a delicate and sensitively told story of ambiguity. It centers on Wayne Blake, born with both male and female sex organs and raised as a boy by his parents, Jacinta and Treadway. Treadway is the one who makes the decision to raise the baby as a male and then spends Wayne's childhood trying to impress upon him the ways to be a "man." Jacinta, meanwhile, longs for the daughter who never was while becoming lonelier and lonelier in her marriage and Thomasina, the neighbor who delivered Wayne and is privy to the family's secret, becomes a beacon of acceptance for Wayne, though she struggles over how much to tell him.

Identity is obviously a major theme in Annabel and Winter allows both Wayne's male identity and his female identity, known as Annabel, to flower as the novel progresses. Though the secrecy that surrounds him for much of his life causes him some pain, primarily through his inability to understand why it is that he seems to be a frequent disappointment to his father, Wayne is more or less at peace with his nature. He is not afraid or ashamed of his female self, though he longs to embrace that identity more fully than he feels that society would allow.

Annabel is a complex, thought provoking, and touching character study. Winter deals with the subject in a direct way and allows her characters to become fully fleshed and distinctly human. Annabel is a wonderful book about the yearning to belong, one which is relatable to anyone. It will grip from the first page and remain with you long after you've reached the last.

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I (2009)

"It was not a good moment for monarchies. Within Germany, the kings of Bavaria and Wurttemberg had been deposed; the ruling grand dukes of Coburg, Hesse and Mecklenburg-Strelitz had all abdicated, and the latter had then shot himself. Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary... had abdicated on Armistice Day. Ferdinand, self-styled 'tsar' of Bulgaria... also went that month. George's cousin 'Tino,' King of Greece, had abdicated in 1917... In Turkey, Sultan Mehmed V had died in May; his brother and successor, Mehmed VI, would be deposed in 1922. As Armistice Day crowds came to Buckingham Palace to cheer, George was the only emperor still standing on his balcony."

Miranda Carter's George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I is a book of remarkable depth and breadth, examining one of the most volatile and violent periods in European history. Though the title may suggest that its focus is primarily on one generation of royals, it goes deeper than that, reaching back to George's father and grandmother - King Edward VII and Queen Victoria, respectively - to paint a picture of relationships in flux and political destinies in the process of being shaped.

Carter takes great care in drawing the characters in this book, charting their development as the modern world is born and revealing the sharp contrasts between the public figures and the real men who existed in the shadows. All three cousins, though particularly Nicholas and Wilhelm who ascended to their respective thrones and gained actual power rather than the ceremonial power enjoyed by George, attempt to cut impressive, dominating figures within their countries, though in reality each is wrecked with insecurity and an inability to focus on the actual issues involved in running a government. As the story progresses towards the outbreak of World War I, it becomes clear just how little power the three ultimately had as they find themselves swept up in the changing political tides, unable to do anything to prevent the destruction of the age of kings.

Three Cousins covers a lot of ground and explores the complexities of a lot of relationships, not just between members of the various royal families (which, in the grand scheme of things, are really just one large extended family, as demonstrated by the family trees Carter provides) but also between the royals and various politicans and courtiers. Although Carter can sometimes be a bit repetitive with respect to how she describes various figures, her writing style is engaging and she relates the story with a sly wit that makes the book immensely readable. Three Cousins should be considered an essential read for anyone with an interest in World War I and the evolution/meaning of monarchy in the modern age.