Discover new selections
$2.99 with 79 percent savings
Print List Price: $14.50

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Sold by Amazon.com Services LLC.
You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Philip Larkin
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

A Girl in Winter Kindle Edition

by Philip Larkin (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.9 out of 5 stars 251 ratings

This classic novel captures twelve transformative hours in the life of an exiled woman living in England and working at a library during World War II.

Philip Larkin’s second novel was first published in 1947. This story of Katherine Lind and Robin Fennel, of winter and summer, of war and peace, of exile and holidays, is memorable for its compassionate precision and for the uncommon and unmistakable distinction of its writing.

Praise for A Girl in Winter

“A highly sensitive, rather meditative and slowly moving novel, a work of deliberately modest proportions reminiscent of Virginia Woolf and the early Elizabeth Bowen. . . . Larkin has the ability to evoke, in a few bleak images, a sense of waste and disillusion and emptiness that is as profound as the similarly barren vision of Beckett.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New Republic

“A Girl in Winter is a beautifully constructed, funny and profoundly sad book.” —Andrew Motion

Previous slide of product details
  1. Print length
    249 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    The Overlook Press
  4. Publication date
    November 15, 1985
  5. File size
    3.0 MB
  6. Page Flip
    Enabled
  7. Word Wise
    Enabled
  8. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
Next slide of product details

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This 1947 novel from the late Larkin, who was one of England's most distinguished poets, tells the story of a fateful winter day in the life of a European woman who has fled to England during WW II.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 and was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John's College, Oxford. As well as his volumes of poems, which include The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, he wrote two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Diary, and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. He worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. He was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the WHSmith Award.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07MXCRB2F
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Overlook Press (November 15, 1985)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 15, 1985
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 3.0 MB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 249 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 out of 5 stars 251 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
251 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers
Write a customer review

Top reviews from the United States

  • Abra Moore
    5.0 out of 5 stars this book is on my desert isle list
    Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2011
    Verified Purchase
    This is one of the most exquisitely perfect novels I have ever read. I said so to a friend, a woman, who'd read the infamous Andrew Motion biography of Philip Larkin, and she said: "It must be gruesome on the subject of women." Well, it's told from the point of view of a woman and it's heartbreakingly real, brave, and nuanced. I believed every moment. Its structure is so perfectly rendered, its mood both dark and yet shimmering with light. It's also one of the few books I've read set in England during the war that's willing to depict a sense of desperation and fatalism. So many books set in England during the war were written many years later, with the inevitable airbrushed nostalgia. Not this one. It's a glimpse of a suspended moment in time, the likes of which most of us are lucky to never have experienced. This is one of the best 10 novels I have ever read.
    89 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Pygmy Possum
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    A poet's eye for emotion and detail.
    8 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Kindle Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Fine Novel
    Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    I enjoyed reading Philip Larkin's novel. It was quiet and soft spoken telling the story of a French young woman who ended up living in England. Reading this work was like listening to quiet French Impressionistic music.
    4 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Carol
    2.0 out of 5 stars Not worth reading
    Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Truly did not understand any kudos for this book. Didn’t care about any characters. Way too spare.
    4 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Henry Miller
    5.0 out of 5 stars Still Waters
    Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2015
    I fear this novel is often mistaken – when it is taken at all – as an evocation of a time and place (England, ca. 1940), or as a canvas on which Larkin was developing the poetic voice that would subsequently make his name. As such, readers may find more or less to like in A Girl in Winter, but will miss its profundity. In fact, what Larkin does with this book is to communicate a very particular, perturbing idea of what it is to be a person, particularly a person of “sensibility” (p. 164). Lest this trigger a not unreasonable aversion to “psychological,” or “philosophical” novels, however, let it be said that Larkin knows how to “show, don’t tell,” creating a book that is, in some sense, “so fine no idea could violate it.” To read it is not to receive a set of propositions, or even to follow a series of events, but to behold experience in a particular way.

    Most of that experience is interior to Katherine Lind, the “girl” of the title. On paper, the plot is so slender as to be almost irrelevant. A foreign refugee in England in the early years of World War II, Katherine works in a branch library in a provincial town. Several years before, she spent three summer weeks in England with the family of a school pen pal. Now, she may renew contact with them. That’s it. Although this seems to trouble some readers – no less a litterateur than Joyce Carol Oates finds the novel “curiously without action” – it strikes me as a good deal more realistic than event-laden novels in which momentous things happen; for how often do truly momentous things happen to any of us?

    Indeed, what the novel shows is how much of the meaning of events emanates from ourselves, and how much disappointment may follow from a failure to find a corresponding meaning reflected back to us. Katherine attends intensely to her experiences, and yet finds that these fail to sustain her with purpose. In a minor key, for instance, the novel shows Katherine enraged and fascinated by Mr. Anstey, the petty bureaucrat who manages the library, while the other staff simply take him in stride, like “the weather” (p. 24). Of course, to treat another person like the weather is not to treat them like a person at all; Katherine, whatever her feelings towards him, tries to comprehend Anstey in the round, as the entire affair of Anstey, Ms. Parbury, and the lost handbag shows.

    More portentously, Katherine’s pre-war summer visit to Robin Fennel, her English pen pal, shows her turning over their interactions, attempting to discern some feeling or motivation hidden within him, only to discover finally that there is no “there” there (pp. 142, 146-47). But the contingent, almost whimsical quality of this encounter – happening for no very great reason, it leads in itself to nothing consequential – really serves to show us Katherine’s present, fragile condition, in which the summer visit and her acquaintance with the Fennels take on an outsized importance (pp. 216-17; 232). The effect is subtle, yet deeper than the recitation of any number of details about her home country, her family, or her flight to England could achieve.

    Perhaps for this reason, I find Katherine a profoundly sympathetic character. Joyce Carol Oates, again, finds her “shadowy and vaporous,” not really a character at all (in part, bizarrely, because we are not apprised of her sexual history, which says more about Oates than about this book). In fact, Katherine is an intensely sensitive and in many ways outward-looking person, alert to the characteristics of those around her, from Ms. Green her lowly co-worker (p. 34), to Ms. Parbury the chance acquaintance (pp. 192-93), or to Robin and Jane Fennel (e.g., p. 142).

    That sensibility also comprehends the distance between herself and others – positioned like “fellow-traveller[s] in a railway carriage” (p. 237) – and regrets it. Katherine looks for meaning in these connections; the more ordinary view may be expressed by Robin Fennel when in the course of seducing her he rejoins that “I don’t see that anything means very much. I spend all my time doing things that don’t matter two-pence. So do you” (p. 242). Most of us skate over the surface of things – mundane errands, employers’ harangues, seductions, all of it like so much “weather” in which we move – and to pause and look too deeply is perhaps to ask for such disappointment at Katherine receives. The book ends, finally, in sleep, a kind of peace and yet also a kind of surrender to an austere existence for a soul such as Katherine’s. The truth of this vision may be disputable, but I don’t think that its beauty is.
    71 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Craig Nova
    5.0 out of 5 stars Precise, Beautiful, Haunting, And An Unacknowledged Masterpiece of the 20th Century
    Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2019
    When confronting a novel this moving, precise, and beautiful, a reader is at some peril to be equal to the task of describing it. And, of course, the question to be answered is why this book is so mesmerizing, its beauty so mysteriously haunting, and, above everything else, why in each moment, in each sentence, the reader has the overwhelming sense that not one false element, not one instant of vainglory has come into play. One of the aspects of this that I found most intriguing is how, like all of the great writers (and there are great writers), Larkin manages to take what seems mundane, such as a visit, a dinner, a job and to imbue it with the most profound sensibility. Also, it is amazing to me that this isn’t one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the 20th century, since it surely is that.
    15 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Patrican
    5.0 out of 5 stars Larkin's imagery as divine revelation
    Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2012
    The writing in this book is so good that it kept me up way past my bedtime, despite that I twice put the book down firmly, determined to leave some for tomorrow. The story line itself is remarkably gripping; it's mostly in a woman's head, what she's thinking and what she's doing about what she's thinking. But of course, it's here presented by a male author, so its authenticity is suspect. In any case, the story line is only a scaffold on which to drape the imagery in the sentences. The imagery is throw-away, scattered everywhere about in the sentences. Some of it is door-opening. Just open the book to any page and start reading.

    I don't know why Larkin didn't continue with novels, but it does seem to me that A Girl in Winter fails at establishing a background ambiance. The title contains the word 'winter,' and the story is set on a cold winter day in WWII black-out England. Some paragraphs convey details of the cold and the dark, but somehow I didn't come away remembering any feeling of cold or dark. The book doesn't "place" you, in the way that Conrad can put you in a storm at sea, or isolated in an upriver Indonesian clearing. It may be because Larkin breaks the winter day into two parts that bookend a long flashback to a summer holiday. But I suspect that it's caused by the metaphorical imagery in the book: it is so pervasive, and so vivid, that even the cold and the dark are taken to be properties of the soul, or of life itself. Larkin uses language in realms far from where it was invented. After he transported me to a view of those realms, I was very reluctant to return.
    24 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English
  • Redhenry
    5.0 out of 5 stars A minor masterpiece
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 26, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    I had been aware of this book for many years but had not read it because it, and Larkin's other early novel, 'Jill', have been dismissed by some critics as juvenilia. Well, that may be the case, but I have been reading Larkin's 'Letters to Monica', in which he refers to 'A Girl in Winter' several times and it seems to have meant quite a lot to him so I read it. I found it delightful. The opening description of a winter day in the countryside is glorious, as perfectly detailed as a crisp monochrome film. Once the story begins, the action is small-scale and the characters are plainly drawn, but the atmosphere and fine detail of England in the war years are superb. The main impression given by the central characters, particularly Katherine, is of people trying to find their places in the world, of learning to deal with people outside their experience, of lowering expectations and dealing with disappointment. Familiar themes to those acquainted with Larkin's poems. A lovely book which deserves to be better known.
    Report
  • Fernando Villamía
    5.0 out of 5 stars Delicadísima novela
    Reviewed in Spain on May 12, 2016
    Verified Purchase
    Narra el aprendizaje de la decepción con una finura exquisita. Asistimos al nacimiento de la ilusión y el amor con asombrosa precisión psicológica y poética, para llegar a su derrumbe descrito con la misma penetración e idéntico dominio del lenguaje. Una joya.
    Report
  • simoom
    4.0 out of 5 stars Not so much reading a novel as living a life
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2022
    Verified Purchase
    I felt that I wasn't so much reading a novel as living a life. Larkin's prose immerses you within another psyche - as if the reader as audience is irrelevant - just as when you live your life it is just what it is without an observer, without intent. The writing is extraordinary, prose poetry that is moving in its understated exactitude - like the beauty of black and white photographs - and belonging to another time and place - in this case, England in the 1940s. The plot is largely an irrelevance though many scenes are compelling and intense despite their ordinariness. The only reason I gave it 4 stars - not 5 - is because I expected everything to coalesce at the end, and it didn't. But then again, that is life.
    Report
  • Margaret
    3.0 out of 5 stars Good literature but not entertaining
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 14, 2020
    Verified Purchase
    I thought it was a very well written book, use of language very good and apt. Some very beautiful descriptions of weather and scenery.
    An excellent piece of literature, but
    Not entertaining, gloomy, dull and detached where characters were concerned. Probably a feature of the era when the author was writing, with the aftermath of two world wars and the Great Depresdion.
    Report
  • Mary Mahon
    5.0 out of 5 stars A journey into the 40sand 50s- excellent
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 13, 2024
    Verified Purchase
    I was reminded of when I had my first job in Ireland in which I was known as a semi-civil servant. Our office was in a lovely Georgian House in Clare St in Dublin where James the porter had lit a fire every day in the typing pool. We all called each other Miss or Mr.
    Report

Report an issue


Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Report
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Report
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?
Report