“This taut, atmospheric novel is an ode to the complicated heartbreak of loving what will forever be just out of reach.”

—Laura van den Berg, award-winning author of The Third Hotel

Claudio’s apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself. Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. In parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love’s inevitable loss.

“Nettel’s sharp, potent novel depicts how even the briefest relationship can affect the rest of a life.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A luminous writer of dark humor and wild insight. After the Winter is a deeply compassionate story about love, about how hard it is to know another—let alone ourselves—in all our strange glory. Yet, in the end, it is also a story about how essential it is, in spite of the pitfalls, to try.”

—Nick Flynn, award-winning author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“Insightful and painfully poignant…examines the bonds between people, the degrees of intimacy and commitment we allow ourselves and the toll isolation can take upon the soul.”

—Glasgow Herald