August Into Winter

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

The first novel in nearly a decade from the three-time Governor General's Award‒winning author of The Last Crossing, August Into Winter is an epic story of crime and retribution, of war and its long shadow, and of the redemptive possibilities of love.

You carried the past into the future on your back, its knees and arms hugging you tighter with every step.

It is 1939, with the world on the brink of global war, when Constable Hotchkiss confronts the spoiled, narcissistic man-child Ernie Sickert about a rash of disturbing pranks in their small prairie town. Outraged and cornered, Ernie commits an act of unspeakable violence, setting in motion a course of events that will change forever the lives of all in his wake.

With Loretta Pipe--the scrappy twelve-year-old he idealizes as the love of his life--in tow, Ernie flees town. In close pursuit is Corporal Cooper, who enlists the aid of two brothers, veterans of World War One: Jack, a sensitive, spiritual man with a potential for brutal violence; and angry, impetuous Dill, still recovering from the premature death of his wife who, while on her deathbed, developed an inexplicable obsession with the then-teenaged Ernie Sickert.

When a powerful storm floods the prairie roads, wreaking havoc, Ernie and Loretta take shelter in a one-room schoolhouse where they are discovered by the newly arrived teacher, Vidalia Taggart. Vidalia has her own haunted past, one that has driven her to this stark and isolated place with only the journals of her lover Dov, recently killed in the Spanish Civil War, for company. Dill, arriving at the schoolhouse on Ernie's trail, falls hard and fast for Vidalia--but questions whether he can compete with the impossible ideal of a dead man.

Guy Vanderhaeghe, writing at the height of his celebrated powers, has crafted a tale of unrelenting suspense against a backdrop of great moral searching and depth. His is a canvas of lavish, indelible detail: of character, of landscape, of history--in all their searing beauty but all their ugliness, too. Vanderhaeghe does not shrink from the corruption, cruelty, and treachery that pervade the world. Yet even in his clear-eyed depiction of evil--a depiction that frequently and delightfully turns darkly comic--he will not deny the possibility of love, of light. With August Into Winter, Guy Vanderhaeghe has given us a masterfully told, masterfully timed story for our own troubled hearts.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Canada, Literary Fiction, Crime, Audiobook, Thriller

480 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2021

About the author

Guy Clarence Vanderhaeghe, OC, SOM is a Canadian fiction author.

Vanderhaeghe received his Bachelor of Arts degree with great distinction in 1971, High Honours in History in 1972 and Master of Arts in History in 1975, all from the University of Saskatchewan. In 1978 he received his Bachelor of Education with great distinction from the University of Regina. In 1973 he was Research Officer, Institute for Northern Studies, University of Saskatchewan and, from 1974 until 1977, he worked as Archival and Library Assistant at the university. From 1975 to 1977 he was a freelance writer and editor and in 1978 and 1979 taught English and history at Herbert High School in Herbert, Saskatchewan. In 1983 and 1984 he was Writer-in-Residence with the Saskatoon Public Library and in 1985 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ottawa. He has been a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa (1985-86), faculty member of the Writing Program of the Banff Centre for the Arts (1990-91), faculty member in charge of senior fiction students in the SAGE Hills Creative Writing Program (1992). Since 1993 he has served as a visiting professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan.

Vanderhaeghe lives with his wife in Saskatoon.

Vanderhaeghe's first book, Man Descending: selected stories (1982), was winner of a Governor General's Award and the United Kingdom's Faber Prize. A novel, The Englishman's Boy (1996), won him a second Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and for Best Book of the Year, and it was shortlisted for both the Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

He is perhaps best-known for The Last Crossing (2001), a national bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year. The novel was selected for the 2004 edition of Canada Reads as the book that should be read by all Canadians.

In 2003, Vanderhaeghe was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Reviews

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ernie Sickert, the etiolated young man who had brought them news of the break‑in, had appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing what had become a uniform for him, grey flannel trousers, starched white shirt, and mulberry bow tie. Tall and so lanky that he verged on emaciation, Sickert had both hands up on the top of the door frame from which he hung like human drapery. An elaborate stack of towering pompadour crowned his narrow head, a hairdo that he had adopted during his days when he had played tenor sax for the Rhythm Alligators, a local dance band. Ernie had an expectant air, an I’m‑preparing‑to‑lick‑ice‑cream look on his face.

Guy Vanderhaeghe is a reliably excellent writer and his literary hallmarks are on full display in August into Winter — this is a very manly historical fiction, set firmly on the Saskatchewan prairie as only he can describe it, with good guys and bad guys, heart-thumping action and heart-touching drama — and I am delighted to have had an early read of this fine novel; I have no doubt it will be up for all the Canadian literary awards this year. Slightly spoilery from here, but not much beyond the publisher’s blurb. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

“I’ve got a problem. A big one. The storm has cut Connaught off from the outside world. Completely. Telephone, telegraph lines, they’re all down. Roads are impassable.The foreman of the section gang came in on a handcar at six o’clock and said that the railway trestle bridge over Cutbank Creek to the east is ready to collapse and that the embankment on the west line has washed out. There’ll be no trains running to Connaught for days. Which means that I can’t contact any other detachments to let them know what’s happened here, can’t warn them that Ernie Sickert is on the loose. It all falls on me. I’ve got no one to turn to for help.”

It’s August of 1939 and Ernie Sickert — the twenty-one-year-old pompadour-wearing, hepcat-talking, sax-playing, commando-wannabe — has gone from playing bizarre pranks on his neighbours in the village of Connaught to committing an unspeakable act of violence. Thinking himself smarter than everyone around him and basically untouchable, the psychopathic Sickert picks up his “girlfriend” Loretta (a twelve-year-old orphan with stick legs and a threadbare hand-me-down dress) and drives his mother’s Oldsmobile into the heart of a torrential rainstorm. Once the car inevitably breaks down, Ernie and Loretta make a run for it and the town’s rookie cop enlists the help of a couple of locals to track them down. These locals, Oliver and Jack Dill, are WWI veterans who still carry the mental aftereffects of their time in combat (Jack is a religious obsessive, writing an interminable opus on The City of God, and the reclusive Oliver is a recent widower whose dead wife had befriended the Sickert boy when he was a child), but with their horse skills, knowledge of the area, and combat experience, the Dill brothers are soon in hot pursuit of the runaways.

The great glacier of anger that was Oliver Dill was grinding the bedrock of his being to gravel. The pressure of it was inescapable; sometimes he felt it a little less, sometimes a little more, but it was always present. For the last three years the glacier had been moving toward some unknown destination the way an icefield moves, inch by inch. This afternoon it had brought him to this point: Would he act as Judith would want him to act and try to spare the boy’s life? Or would the glacier follow the natural course of its inclinations, implacably inch forward and crush Ernie Sickert?

Along the way, the posse adds the local schoolteacher to their number (Vidalia was a recent transplant from Winnipeg; a fiercely independent woman who finds herself stranded in Connaught after the schoolhouse burns down), and as her history unspools, we learn that she is mourning the death of her lover: a Communist intellectual who was recently killed when he joined the Canadian Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion to fight the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. As the action of this novel mainly takes place from August into November of 1939 (hence the title) — the timeframe in which Europe was bracing for another World War and Bolshevik sympathisers like Vidalia were stunned by Hitler and Stalin’s nonaggression pact and subsequent carving up of Poland — the very specific moment in history affects everything that happens (and as each chapter opens with a headline and news snippet from the Winnipeg Evening Tribune, we are always aware of the larger events playing out in the background of the very local drama). When Oliver Dill eventually offers Vidalia a job typing up his brother’s manuscript, we are treated to long passages of Jack’s religious mania; and when Vidalia then decides to spend some of her time typing up the diary that her dead lover had kept in Spain, we then intimately learn of the unimaginable hardships faced by the Mac-Paps.

Vidalia was stalled. Coming to the end of Dov’s journal left her wondering if life wasn’t a court convened and presided over by idiots. Left her wondering why she had clung so tenaciously to optimism, to belief in a better future if those things could be taken away as easily as they had been taken from Dov, by an accident, a stumble in the dark, by a politically motivated arrest.

All of Vanderhaeghe’s characters in this novel are incredibly complex — with complicated histories revealed at length — and I found them, for the most part, to be frustratingly unknowable. Vidalia is prickly and standoffish — a self-satisfied intellectual and a feminist whose ambition outstrips her opportunities — but Oliver Dill falls for her, acting puppyish and playful in a way that I wouldn’t have predicted from the gruff loner we meet in the beginning. Vidalia does not want to be taken care of (even if she has few options), Dill can’t help but be a caregiver (he has taken care of Jack for twenty years, took care of his late wife in her final years), and I’m not certain that I loved (or completely bought) how their storyline ended.

For many years, in his mind Dill had been trying to correct the past. But the past was beyond correction. If the past led to death then death was surely beyond correction too. You carried the past into the future on your back, its knees and arms hugging you tighter with every step. His heart was where it was.

This is a longish novel (my kindle app clocked it at around eleven hours for me), and with so much at play — Oliver’s memories from WWI, Dov’s account of the Spanish Civil War, the news from Europe on the eve of WWII, everyone’s personal backstories, and Jack’s manuscript — it got to feel like a bit much. But the muchness is rather the point: Everyone is carrying their pasts into the future, and it’s undeniably a burden. The plot of August Into Winter has plenty of truly heart-in-your-throat moments and I found the conclusion to the main conflict to be perfectly satisfying. This is a long road and definitely worth the trip; that Ernie Sickert is one creepy piece of work.

Take your lead from me, Mayfield. Do as I do. Creative havoc, well‑played, leads to victory. Creative havoc is the jazz of war.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would have been an easy 4 had it not been so lengthy, which I felt wasn’t needed. With the caveat that a major plot was dedicated, obviously, to war fiction, which I simply don’t get along with. The highest I’ve rated any war fiction or military fiction is 3 stars. It is incessantly monotonous, uninteresting, and highly derivative.

That said, if you like that kind of fiction, this is for you. I didn’t put this this down because the writing and craft was excellent. It has the dreaded multi timeline, also somewhat derivative, nowadays; but in this case structurally warranted. It goes into the “normal” hardships, which I’m sorry to minimize but at this point it is some of the most predictable characterizations and arcs in fiction today, as they suffer and are broken in immediate and long-term ways, directly correlating to future events in the book.

And, I might add, to arguably the central tension in the friendship slash courtship of two characters, in particular. War is suffering, home and abroad, etc.. as I said: it is a testament to the voice crafted here and the specificity and diction used that I stayed on. If you are at all interested in the premise of the book and the contemporary war fiction/historical romance drama aspects, I suggest you pick it up. It will almost certainly be a highlight of the year for you.

[Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful writing as always from Vanderhaeghe. I cared deeply for each character; all of them flawed in some way. Leaving a five star rating to offset the ridiculous one star rating.

[Penny (Literary Hoarders) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful. Incredible writing, use of metaphor, characters....it was all so wonderful. Miss being with these characters and this story.

[J. Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been a fan of Guy Vanderhaeghe's writing from the very start. This new novel--August Into Winter--is the best damn book I have read in I don't know how long. When you read someone whose writing is impeccable, whose way of seeing is so original, whose imagery and phrasing is full of surprises, who can handle suspense, and ugliness, and beauty the way Guy does, it's almost beyond words. I can't recommend this book enough: brilliant story-telling, unusual and astonishing imagery and ways with language, solid historical accuracy and details, and completely engaging in every way. This new novel is a gut -wrenching, heart-breaking, page turning masterfully written book: I can't get enough of this man's prose. He can gently brush in the stalks of grain moving ominously in a wheat field, the prairie sky in all its ambivalence, the prairie breeze, the canned saskatoon berries like purple buttons in a jar, and he can pull back, give us a view as wide as Saskatchewan, bluntly present a murder, an arson, a robbery in ways that are totally unique and distinctive. Read this book!

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vanderhaeghe never disappoints. Here he gives us a fascinating cast of characters who interact in the most intriguing ways. As one other reviewer mentioned, I cared about all of the characters, and found the resolution satisfying and wholly original. He takes us on a trek through Europe as well as small-town Saskatchewan, covering a sweep of time that spans two world wars, and hinting at what we ourselves may be facing in our own time to come. Vanderhaeghe gives us a smart, wry, and captivating book about the very places most of us would never think to look.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can’t quite give this book four stars. It is unnecessarily long, with the author determined to shoehorn an account of the Spanish Civil War into an already dense story of many threads. While the characters are well-drawn, the secondary plots often tend to get in the way of the main story.

[Mary Greiner · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a story! Beautifully written, engrossing, exposing the after effects of war, the pettiness of society, and the dark underbelly of humanity. I can’t wait to read more Vanderhaeghe.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of Guy Vanderhaeghe and his latest novel has everything: War, murder, romance, vivid characters and a gripping narrative set at a time in history that seems to be repeating itself today. Plus there are beautiful descriptions of the Prairies. What more could I want? Nothing.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

First new novel from Guy Vanderhaeghe in a decade and it's a winner. Almost an opus, it's a tale of murder and revenge set in the Canadian prairies during WWII, terrain that Vanderhaege knows and covers so well. There is a subplot which involves a Canadian volunteer who goes to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and at first this is something of a distraction from the mayhem of the main tale. Later, the reader realizes that the author is using both stories to examine the nature of evil on both an individual and institutional level, and the terrible consequences in either case. What Vanderhaege does with aplomb is acute characterization and the main players just jump off the page; the Dill brothers, Miss Loretta, Miss Vidalia, and the terrible villain of the piece, one Ernie Sickert. Plenty of action and an incredible climax that's hard to top. Storytelling at a very high level by a remarkable teller.

[Joan W · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first Guy Vanderhaeghe book I’ve read … and from the very first few pages I knew I was in for a treat! I was immediately immersed in this world - set in a small town in Saskatchewan during the 1930’s - replete with murder, mayhem… love & war! And I was enthralled by all of it! What an incredible writer… I can hardly wait to read all of his books!

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful and propulsive, with some nice dashes of very black humour. Vanderhaege creates complex characters, I.e. real people, who wrestle credibly with the challenges of their times. I love his historical fiction and his brilliant way with words.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good story with some amazing characters.

[Jason P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever I finish a book like this I feel like I should be reading even more Canadian fiction. Guy Vanderhaeghe is a masterful storyteller and I was caught up with his characters and transported to a perfectly realized 1930s Connaught, Saskatchewan from the first pages. I just love his sense of story. I feel like so many writers pump out poetic prose where not much happens. Not that his writing doesn’t have a beauty and a rhythm of its own - but he maintains suspense and drive for nearly 500 pages. I guess they call that plot!!!

[Melissa S · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you like Vanderhaeghe's writing, you know you can confidently surrender yourself into the hands of a master storyteller and just let the plot unfold. Set in 1930s Saskatchewan, the story gets into every nook and cranny of a small group of fully realized and very human characters (if details aren't your jam, this probably isn't the book for you). After a tense start, the story abruptly pulls in the reins and turns into a slow-burn love story before building again to a satisfying ending. The middle probably could have been at least 50 pages shorter with no ill effect, but I really enjoyed learning about the Canadian involvement in the Spanish Civil War and Canadian attitudes on the eve of WWII.

[Gail Amendt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guy Vanderhaeghe has a way with words. I always enjoy his writing. His prose is beautiful and descriptive, his plots are creative, his characters are complex, and you always learn something. In this novel, deeply damaged WWI veterans Oliver and Jack Dill find themselves hunting down a psychopathic killer in the final days before the outbreak of WWII. The killer, Ernie Sickert, is one of the most horrifying characters I have read in a long time. Along the way they encounter Vidalia Taggart, an independent school teacher trying to rebuild her life after losing her lover to the Spanish Civil War. Vanderhaeghe explores the aftermath of war and loss, and the healing power of love and friendship. We learn a bit about the Spanish Civil war as Vidalia finally finds the courage to read her deceased lover's journal. All of the characters are very well developed, and the ending was quite unexpected and satisfying.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read and I really liked the Canadian/Saskatchewan connection. Interesting characters and likeable except for the ones you don’t like. And they were very unlikeable. And they were supposed to be. End was not what I hoped for and a bit slow but in all an entertaining read. My third Guy V. book I’ve read.

[Michael Bryson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is not a novel, it’s a treatment for a mini-series. It has a series of interweaving plot lines that you will either admire, thinking it’s in the style of Tolstoy, or you will grind your teeth at, thinking what now? Also, why should I care?

The central through line story is about a psychotic young man, who murders a number of people, is chased across Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle valley in 1939, where is caught, arrested jailed, then escapes. Won’t give away the ending, because does it really matter? While the psycho is in jail the novel focuses on sub-plots involving two brothers and a school teacher, who were roping to the chasing of the psycho by police. Plus the psycho’s 13-year-old girlfriend, straight out of Rebel Without A Cause central casting.

Then there is a sub-sub-plot involving the school teachers married boyfriend (married, but not to her), who has left her to pursue historical destiny as a combatant of Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He dies, and the school teacher receives his journal, which appears in volume in the novel. Why? Well, cuz.

Lots of things happen in this novel because lots of things happen in this novel. If you like incident for the sake of incident, this is your book. As noted above, the model here may be Tolstoy. The little newspaper clippings at the beginning of chapters were interesting, though unrelated to the plot. They opened the window a peak to a Canada more mysterious than expected. That seems to be the meta-meaning here. The world is a weird, weird place.

[C.A. Simonsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dunstan Ramsay, Hagar Shipley, Moses Sweetland, Eldon Starlight...add Ernie Sickert to the list of classic characters of Canadian literature.

Ernie Sickert is "a painful parcel of haemorrhoids". He is "a limp d$%k in a twenty-five-dollar suit". Ernie Sickert is a killer without a conscience.

Yes, I know: the primary character of August Into Winter is the hardworking Oliver Dill. But it's Ernie Sickert who makes the story a winner. It's been some years since I read Vanderhaeghe's outstanding The Englishman's Boy, but August Into Winter is possibly its equal. Vanderhaeghe's language is beautiful. It is easy to picture that middle age of 1939 Saskatchewan: horses and cars, log heating and electricity, airplanes but no running water.

The second half of the book detours somewhat from young Sickert's devious schemes - some readers may find the one-sided romance less riveting than other sections of the novel. I found the whole thing fantastic.

Great work, Mr. Vanderhaeghe. I will be reading your short story collection, Man Descending, soon.

[Steven Langdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a superb and harrowing book. Set mostly in Saskatchewan it’s a murder mystery, a love story and a deep and disturbing depiction of the destruction that war imposes over many years.

The villain is a smart but self centered young man Ernie Sickert who is a very dramatic character. And his antagonists are equally fascinating — the Dill brothers and school teacher Vidalya Taggart who is caught up in the Spanish civil war where her lover Dov has been killed.

Over 450 intense pages the author follows a complex plot that draws these people to a hard edged climax that will keep you deeply engaged and uncertain what will happen.

An excellent novel that we have waited for too long from this author!

[Doug Dosdall · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit of a genre hopper but I think it succeeds best when it is in pure crime fiction mode. The sections of the book that cover the violence and the chase are riveting and hard to put down. But then it really bogs down in a way too long middle section. It's a long book and I could easily see 30% of it being chopped out. For example all the characters in the book agree that Jack's writing is rambling and basically nuts and yet we get pages of it inserted into the narrative. Unfortunately I was reading via the audiobook version so there was no easy way to skip it but no idea why Vanderhaeghe felt the need to include it? Was definitely going to give it 5 stars until it really started dragging. Picks up again at the end.

[Lori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly written, epic in proportion and amazingly hopeful despite its dark subject matter, this novel is a must read for all fans of Vanderhaeghe’s storytelling, pre-second world war history and beautiful prose that honors the resilience of the human spirit and the transformational power of love. With relatable characters that you grow to know and love and a desperate, violent and frightening crime story at its root, August Into Winter is compelling, moving and entertaining. Highly recommended.

[Elizabeth (Literary Hoarders) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, even though it includes one of the worst villains I’ve ever encountered. I loved the main characters, but the one that affected me the most was Jack. He left an indelible mark. And while I started out liking Miss Vidalia, by the book’s end, I grew tired of her melancholy and self pity. As for Dill, what can I say? He was a complicated character with limitless depth, and I won’t be forgetting him anytime soon. Overall, this is a lengthy read, but one that really draws you in.

[Dustin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read by a local Saskatchewan author.

[Anne Gafiuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the latest novel by Guy Vanderhaeghe. I learned more about the Spanish Civil War throughout this story about two brothers (WWI veterans), a teacher, her dead lover, and a small town community on the Canadian Prairies at the start of WWII. I was very impressed how the author understood the inner workings of his diverse cast of characters. He is a master of describing prairie landscapes (in all his stories).

[Deb Mervold · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an excellent read with wonderful characters and descriptions bringing alive the landscape and situations.

[Jessica Bowering · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought many of the characters were wonderful, with lots of compelling interesting details. I particularly liked both Dill and Dov and many of the characters with smaller roles (various police officers for example). There was a ton of suspense built and maintained in a quiet way that created an extra layer of atmosphere even when unrelated things were happening. I did find some portions a bit longer than necessary and found Vidalia, the main female protagonist, unsympathetic and sometimes a bit annoying. I wanted to like her more.

[Kathy Stinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great writing. A fascinating bunch of flawed characters. Dragged for me in the middle but worth pushing through to the suspenseful satisfying end. I heard an interview with GV in which he said August in Winter might be his last novel. I hope that won’t be the case.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vanderhaeghe is an amazing writer. Admittedly, the book is wordy and heavy on description and I feel that with many other writers, I might have gotten bored. But Vanderhaeghe paints such a clear picture that there are actually no superfluous words; they all add to the story that is being created. The characters are well defined and the plot well constructed. This is a story that really does have everything: mystery, love, good guys, bad guys, war, politics. You just have to be sure you take the time to enjoy every word that is written.

[Lyn Zuberbuhler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story of crime and relationships, interwoven with recollections of 3 characters of their experiences in World War 1 and the Spanish Civil War.
Guy Vanderhaeghe sets scenes expertly and convincingly. His characters are well drawn and come to life in the telling of this story.
I did find some sections overly long.
However, I do plan to read more of his books.