Winter Solstice by Dorothy Cowlin

Winter Solstice

Dorothy Cowlin

‘Strictly from Freud, and for a limited audience, this bizarre psychopathic novel of the strange case of Alexandra Gollen. For nine years Alexandra has been bedridden at her home in a small Lancashire village, and mentally uncapable, apparently, of recalling anything preceding her invalidism. Cared for by her twin brothers, she seemed content in her apathy, taking a strange morbid pride in her sourceless paralysis. It is only in a new friendship for lovely assured Iris Young that she finds again an interest in the world. An adolescent infatuation for Iris, broken when Iris becomes engaged, after she has recovered her health but not her memory. And then she meets a youth, and through him regains her memory, and recalls the disaster that precipitated her escape into forgetfulness, the accidental killing of a younger brother…..The average reader will scarcely find this sympathetic reading.’ ~ Kirkus

‘ WINTER SOLSTICE’ is a story unusual both in theme and quality. It is not everyone’s dish, but the chances are that the reader who likes it will like it very much indeed. A psychological novel, really deserving a place in that much abused category, it is laid in the slums of a bleak and dirty industrial town in the English Midlands, against a background of Dickensian squalor, with characters of limited and poverty-stricken mentality.’ ~ New York Times

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