![]() In the Rijksmuseum, Gerry shows Stella a Rembrandt painting, The Jewish Bride. MacLaverty understands this, conveys it beautifully. “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are,” said Anaïs Nin. Lifting, floating, eddying upwards, sinking among the others.” ![]() At one point, she’s watching a snowstorm through a window: “Stella found herself isolating one particular snowflake – a small one – and watching its progress. ![]() Like Gerry, she has an eye for beauty, but her gaze is often tinged with longing and regret. Stella, by contrast, is more drawn to nature and small details. Architecture was about the size of things compared to the human.” In the airport, he sees his wife from afar: “It was a huge concourse and she looked tiny at the far side of it. Gerry, an architect, is highly attuned to the scale of things. The novel is written in close third person, moving seamlessly between Gerry and Stella’s perspectives. ![]() In the book, the couple take a “midwinter break” to Amsterdam, visiting museums and wandering the city, arm in arm. Long married and retired, they have one son, living abroad in Canada with their grandchild. The voltage increasing as we turn the pages and get to know the couple.īoth Gerry and Stella are from Northern Ireland but moved to Glasgow at the height of The Troubles. In Midwinter Break, emotion sparks between the sentences. ![]() “Sentences are factual, but paragraphs are emotional,” said Gertrude Stein. ![]()
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