When Gabriel English’s partner Nell doesn’t come home from work one day, he connects with longtime friend David Twombly for a trip back to their hometown in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, where years back all their lives began to unravel with a tragic drowning. As the journey progresses, secrets are unveiled, a friendship is tested, and there is a run-in with the Hurley family, a family both men have feared since childhood. In The Architects Are Here, Winter’s fifth and most emotionally resonant novel to date, he explores the nature of grief and friendship in unwaveringly powerful prose, and sheds light on who we are and how we go on when the future seems uncertain.

“A flamboyant gem of a novel… an intense, textured, tangled love story… puts [Winter] in the front rank of writers worth reading.”
—The Globe & Mail

“Supreme originality, shattering insight… Michael Winter is well on his way to having one of the most distinctive voices in Canadian literature.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“Beautifully written, doleful and comic and heartfelt, this just might be the book to bring the 42-year-old Winter the broader audience many think he has long deserved.”
—Edmonton Journal
Read the review

“Brainy and ambitious – just like its author.”
—Toronto Life