The Dakota Winters: A Novel - Hardcover

An Amazon Best Book of December 2018: Anyone who has ever lived in New York knows that New York is ever changing. But there are periods that stand out in the imagination, and the late 70s/early 80s of Tom Barbash’s The Dakota Winters is one of them. It was a tough city, with rampant poverty, drugs, crime, and grime, but it was also a vibrant, creative, non-corporate place of creative ambition. So there’s a lot of warm nostalgia in this novel, and that’s not even mentioning the famous celebrities who find their way into the story. The Dakota in The Dakota Winters is the famous upper West Side building where John Lennon lived (he is in the novel). The Winters are a family that resides in the Dakota. Buddy Winter, the patriarch of the family, is a well-known talk show host who suffered a nervous breakdown several years ago (he’s fictional, don’t look him up). His son, Anton, who contracted malaria while on a post-college tour in the Peace Corps, has returned to secure his own small apartment in the Dakota and figure out where to go from there. The drama in this story begins when Buddy asks his son to help him get back on his professional feet. Set in and around New York, up in Lake Placid during those Olympics, and venturing as far as Bermuda, The Dakota Winters is warm and entertaining, very sharp in its observations, and feels a little itself like a novel from another era. –Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review

Tom Barbash is the author of the award-winning novel, The Last Good Chance, which was was awarded the California Book Award, and the short story collection Stay Up With Me, which was a national bestseller and was nominated for the Folio Prize. His nonfiction book, On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11: A Story of Loss and Renewal, was a New York Times bestseller. His stories and articles have been published in Tin House, McSweeney’s, VQR, and other publications, and have been performed on National Public Radio for their Selected Shorts Series. He currently teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and currently lives in Marin County.