Jan Morris is one of the great British writers of the post-war era. As James Morris she was the journalist who brought back the story of the conquest of Everest in 1953 and who discovered incontrovertible evidence of British involvement in the Suez Crisis of 1956.
'Wintering' captures the fragile moment between innocence and maturity in an entrancing story about growing up - for both a father and a son.In the late 1950s, bankrupt Jaguar salesman Jim Parker must start his life over again in a village near Glastonbury. He grudgingly accepts employment in a relative’s clothing store. Meanwhile his two children attend a tiny rural school and his long-suffering wife sets up house in a primitive farm cottage. While Billy, his son, dreams of the mysterious Glastonbury Tor, Jim secretly sells Billy’s toys to fund his adulterous rendezvous with a teenage waitress. Jim’s meek wife, who knows of the affair but says nothing, tries to fulfil herself through amateur dramatics. Billy comes to learn of his father’s guilty secrets and eventually confronts him. Ostensibly this novel is about how young Billy’s coming of age intertwines with his father’s dawning realisation that he, too, must grow up and stop acting like such a feckless, self-pitying prat.