The wintering

the long version

Joan Williams' third novel, a roman a clef of her relationship with William Faulkner, is the poignant and unusual story of the love between a world-famous writer and a young woman who comes to pay homage to him. Looking to novelist Jeffrey Almoner for advice and inspiration, inexperienced, naive Amy Howard writes him a letter full of all the pain and joy of her youth. The jaded author is moved to respond, and soon the two are meeting clandestinely, in bus stations and off Mississippi back roads, drawn into an affair complicated by her keen awareness of the great difference in their ages and by his marriage.