The Winter Guest: The perfect chilling, gripping mystery as the nights draw in

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Eighteen year old twins Helena and Ruth are struggling. It is Poland, 1940. With their father dead and their mother institutionalised, they are left to jointly raise their younger siblings while desperately trying to ward off starvation and the harsh winters. When Helena comes across a young soldier stranded when his plane crashes, they begin a clandestine relationship and she gradually falls in love with the handsome American. Don’t miss Pam Jenoff’s new novel, Code Name Sapphire , a riveting tale of bravery and resistance during World War II. Much of the film was shot in around Pittenweem, Elie and Earlsferry and Crail in Fife. [4] Reception [ edit ]

Helena and Ruth are twin sister from a small village in Poland during the WWII. With their mother hospitalized they had to start taking care of their three younger siblings. The war is getting closer and supplies are scarce. Things are very dangerous and people are disappearing everyday. As the sisters struggle in their daily life, the rivalry and jealousy between them affects some of their actions and might prove dangerous after Helena saves an American solider and tries to help him. Their lives are harsh. Due to the shortages of food they are constantly starving, they struggle to clothe themselves and their growing siblings. Ruth is the homemaker, caring for everyone whilst Helena has taken on a more “hunter gatherer” role, providing for everyone. The sisters have quite a complex relationship. They love each other, yes, but they are not quite friends, and there is an undercurrent of resentment throughout the book from Ruth. The setting is key. Isolated from the rest of the country, like many rural Poles, Helena and Ruth struggle for daily survival among food rationing, suspicious neighbors, and the looming threat of winter. Their mother lies dying in a Jewish hospital in Krakow — the only place that can care for her — and stalwart Helena makes the long trek to the city every week to visit her, while introspective Ruth stays behind to tend the children, nursing a recent heartbreak. Then Helena stumbles upon an injured American paratrooper in the woods and decides to hide him; this act of mercy sets the stage for a passionate affair and betrayal that changes the sisters’ lives forever. One would think that with a storyline like this it would be a really emotional and interesting read. Unfortunately it was flat and emotionless. The conversation were dull and the actions were slow. Some of the events that happens deserved a better reaction from me but I just didn't feel. I couldn't feel the romance or any sympathy towards the characters, except maybe for Helena at times. The film is based on Sharman MacDonald's play, [2] premiered at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (in the Quarry studio theatre, 23 January to 18 February 1995) before transferring to the Almeida Theatre in London (14 March to 15 April 1995).

The Anglo-Irish community had their homes burned from under them by the IRA in a bid to remove ‘the foreigners’ and return the land to the Irish who were tenants on their own soil. Poverty was rife within the cities but was very much more evident in the rural communities.

Ruth and Helena are 18 years old, twin sisters, who have taken on the role of caring for their homestead and younger siblings in rural occupied Poland. She's a daddy's girl who discovers, completely by accident, that she's got more in common with the Jewish Sam than she imagines. And I don't mean just falling in love with him. She fights with her twin sister, Ruth, a lot. Mostly about Sam. Fighting between sisters is believable, absolutely. Then Helena discovers an American paratrooper stranded outside their small mountain village, wounded, but alive. Risking the safety of herself and her family, she hides Sam—a Jew—but Helena’s concern for the American grows into something much deeper. Defying the perils that render a future together all but impossible, Sam and Helena make plans for the family to flee. But Helena is forced to contend with the jealousy her choices have sparked in Ruth, culminating in a singular act of betrayal that endangers them all—and setting in motion a chain of events that will reverberate across continents and decades. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. This is an amazing story of Helena and Ruth, 18 year old identical twins raising their three younger siblings in a small town in Poland during WW2. They are identical in looks but they are very different from each other in their behaviors. Ruth is more domestic and lady like, Helena is definitely more adventurous and used to the outdoors. As they grow older, they begin to have secrets from each other.

I loved this story because it features two equally strong women as its protagonists, something less often seen in historical fiction than I would like. Jenoff is an excellent historical storyteller; her novels truly capture the hardships faced by mostly ordinary people in wartime. In particular, the overwhelming hunger comes across throughout her writing in this book. Reading this story made me consider the plight of the Polish community during the war, a country sometimes forgotten in history. There are bad things happening and Helena witnesses them, yet there's so little emotion here that even things that should have been frightening just fell flat. Example: the hospital. You hide under the bed while a nurse is raped on top of it and it warrants a mere three or four sentences? Then it's never mentioned again? I would think the trauma of that would evoke a lot more reaction. As I said above, there's a lot more emotion when it comes to the sisters hating on each other or blabbering about their family history than actual traumatic events.

Jenoff ( The Ambassador’s Daughter, 2013, etc.) weaves a tale of fevered teenage love in a time of horrors in the early 1940s, as the Nazis invade Poland and herd Jews into ghettos and concentration camps. A prologue set in 2013, narrated by a resident of the Westchester Senior Center, provides an intriguing setup. A woman and a policeman visit the resident and ask if she came from a small Polish village. Their purpose is unclear until they mention bones recently found there: “And we think you might know something about them.” The book proceeds in the third person, told from the points of view mostly of teenage Helena, who comes upon an injured young Jewish-American soldier, and sometimes of her twin, Ruth, who is not as adventurous as Helena but is very competitive with her. Their father is dead, their mother is dying in a hospital, and they are raising their three younger siblings amid danger and hardship. The romance between Helena and Sam, the soldier, is often conveyed in overheated language that doesn’t sit well with the era’s tragic events: “There had been an intensity to his embrace that said he was barely able to contain himself, that he also wanted more.” Jenoff, clearly on the side of tolerance, slips in a simplified historical framework for the uninformed. But she also feeds stereotypes, having Helena note that Sam has “a slight arch to his nose” and a dark complexion that “would make him suspect as a Jew immediately.” Clichés also pop up during the increasingly complex plot: “But even if they stood in place, the world around them would not.” Il dubbio la combatte nel cuore, ma gli eventi della guerra travolgeranno comunque le loro giovani vite ponendoli di fronte alla scelta di agire o sottrarsi all’occhio del nemico aspettando l’inevitabile fine del loro fragile equilibrio. Proprio Helena lo incontra e lo cura fino a innamorarsene, nonostante ciò non può nasconderlo nella sua dimora senza essere costretta a svelarne l’esistenza a Ruth. A stirring novel of first love in a time of war and the unbearable choices that could tear sisters apart, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan’s Tale

Set in 1940, The Winter Guest is a hauntingly evocative tale of two sisters – twins – who are struggling to care for their three younger siblings in rural Poland at a time of great upheaval and uncertainty. Their father is dead, and their mother is ill in a hospital in Krakow, and the two girls, Helena and Ruth, are trying to fulfil their mother’s last wish by keeping the family together and keeping them all safe. But with severe food shortages, and the ever-present threat of the encroaching German army, life is tough and getting tougher.

Everything is different in winter. The people disappear insideand count on one another. The film opens with a well-coifed woman in her 60s,in a fur coat, making her way across a field in bitter cold. This is Elspeth( Phyllida Law), and she is on her way to the house of her daughter Frances( Emma Thompson). She fears losing her. Frances' husband has died, and she hasretreated into an angry silence beyond mourning. Perhaps she will leaveScotland and move away with her teenage son Alex ( Gary Hollywood). Vita dura, cibo scarso e tanta fame danno poco spazio alle due giovani donne che lottano con le unghie e con i denti per tenere uniti i loro cari. Ms. Jenoff excels in her vivid portrayal of the deprivation and corrosive fear that afflicted those dwelling under Nazi aggression. The sisters are inherently different, convincingly drawn within the paranoia and seething anti-Semitism coursing under their village’s façade. Their claustrophobic insularity, however, can dampen the narrative at moments - until Helena awakens to possibilities beyond those she has known during her increasingly disquieting trips to Krakow. Her discovery of a secret and the tragic events that ensue shatter her confidence; as she fights to find meaning in a world descending into darkness, The Winter Guest proves compulsive in its race to a desperate denouement. The finale offers a moving testament to the suffering that so many endured during the war.It did make good, interesting reading and I wanted to see what happened, although at times it was a little unbelievable. For example, getting in touch with the resistance itself was a little too easy to be believed. There are events that happen after the end of the main story which are only revealed in the epilogue, almost as one liners really. Although these events wrap up the story well, they just did not have that ring of believability to them. An investigation in 2013 starts the book and then the story unfolds as one of the characters remembers the events, but at the end I didn't really see the significance of this investigation and why it was a big deal. There were other things that could have been investigated that might have had a more emotional response from the readers. January 1921. Though the Great War is over, in Ireland a new, civil war is raging. The once-grand Kilcolgan House, a crumbling bastion shrouded in sea-mist, lies half empty and filled with ghosts – both real and imagined – the Prendevilles, the noble family within, co-existing only as the balance of their secrets is kept. Un paracadutista, l’americano di religione ebrea Sam, atterra con il suo aereo tra i monti sopra la piccola casa. Life is a constant struggle for the eighteen-year-old Nowak twins as they raise their three younger siblings in rural Poland under the shadow of the Nazi occupation. The constant threat of arrest has made everyone in their village a spy, and turned neighbor against neighbor. Though rugged, independent Helena and pretty, gentle Ruth couldn’t be more different, they are staunch allies in protecting their family from the threats the war brings closer to their doorstep with each passing day.