Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.
On Christmas Eve, in a hotel on Ireland’s west coast, a man and a woman meet for the first time. As a snowstorm gathers outside windows twinkling with fairy lights, they share a meal, pour wine, propose a toast.
Janice and Gerry may be strangers to one another, but they each have a confession to make.
As the blizzard howls, the night will take an unexpected turn, and their conversation will have consequences far beyond the candlelit table . . .
‘The Winter Guest’ was a delight. Ideal for listening to while curled up somewhere warm on a Winter’s day. I recommend you clear your schedule to listen to this all the way through (two hours and twenty-eight minutes) because, once you start, you’re not going to want to stop until you’ve found out where these confessions are leading.
The story is told mostly as a Christmas Eve dinner conversation between two strangers, the only people who have made it to a posh Irish hotel on the west coast of Ireland during a Red Weather Warning for snow, observed and overheard only by the sous chef turned waiter for the day. One of the strangers is an English woman in her seventies (who claims to be eighty-two) and an Irish man in his forties, back home for the first time in decades, so he can visit his terminally ill mother.
Each stranger has a story to tell, a confession of a sort, describing the worst thing they’ve ever done.
The conversation is civilised, punctuated with lavishly prepared food and lubricated with fine wines and vintage whisky.
The language is wonderful. Conversational but compelling. I wanted to know how each story would end. How each story was told gave me an insight into the character of the storyteller.
Yet, although there was no overt sense of threat, something about the conversation felt… unpredictable, like the sense you get from a dog you thought was tame but are beginning to suspect is feral.
The luxurious atmosphere, the engaging language, the raging snowstorm, the sense of isolation, come together to create an extraordinary bubble of transitory intimacy and shared transgression that, like all bubbles, must eventually burst.
I recommend the audiobook. Niamh Cusack’s narration is pitch-perfect.
