"Richly depicting emotional interiority of its characters, Raeff’s novel reveals how the devastating effects of war and hidden secrets can impact lives across decades." ― Publishers Weekly Ulli is a young woman squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment, one year after the war has ended. She’s scraping together a living as an interpreter between American GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night, Ulli meets two soldiers who will change her life: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing; and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia for New York. Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives―from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and contemporary Morocco. A marriage. Two children. And yet only one parent. At the core of this novel is the mystery of how this came to be: a twisting narrative that explores the dark corners and lantern slides of these characters’ lives, revealing in pieces and fragments what became of their long-ago love triangle set against the brutality of postwar living. Winter Kept Us Warm is an evocative story of family, strained by the cruelty of war and its generational repercussions. A novel of the heart, filled to the brim with unforgettable characters stitching together the deep threads of love, friendship, loyalty, and, of course, loss. "Raeff writes with vivid assurance about Berlin, America, and Morocco, about men and women, about love and work. As the boundaries between characters shift, as past and present converge, Winter Kept Us Warm casts a dazzling spell. A wonderful novel." ―Margot Livesey, author of Mercury and Criminals Praise for Winter Kept Us Warm Winner of the California Book Award Silver Medal in Fiction Finalist for the 2019 California Book Award in Fiction A Finalist for the 2019 Northern California Book Award in Fiction Short–listed for the 2019 Simpson Family Literary Prize The Rumpus , What to Read When 2018 Is Just Around the Corner "Raeff’s ( The Jungle Around Us , 2016) meditative novel effectively conveys the enduring trauma of war, the conflicting desires for stability and escape, and the need to connect." – Booklist "In many ways, this is a novel about absence—the absence of those most harmed by the war; the emotional absence felt inside relationships, romantic or otherwise . . . It is about the choices people slide into almost by accident that end up shaping their lives, and how this becomes clear only with the wisdom of hindsight. This kind of drama is quiet and subtle, but Raeff knows how to wield her words in this space, and makes small pronouncements devastating . . . These characters are in the thick of their lives, and Raeff shows us their fullness in quick sketches, the way a skilled artist may convey movement and attitude with only a few penciled lines." — Los Angeles Times "Richly depicting emotional interiority of its characters, Raeff’s novel reveals how the devastating effects of war and hidden secrets can impact lives across decades." — Publishers Weekly "Raeff writes brilliantly about characters that orbit each other for years on end, evolving and regressing in different corners of the world in ways that parallel their far–flung counterparts . . . In this author’s nimble hands, the struggle for love, safety, and meaning feels palpable as the reader watches each character scour various routes toward those ends . . . Raeff’s great achievement is having assembled a cast so recognizably flawed that it’s easy to root empathetically for their contentment." — Los Angeles Review of Books "Every word here feels set down with care and fierce conscience. The resulting narrative glows as if distilled . . . Winter Kept Us Warm is deeply concerned with what makes a family, with inevitable, unanswerable loss, with the intricacies of language and time; love and war, friendship, the life of art and the imagination, and always (borrowing from Yeats) the quest of the 'pilgrim soul.' In other words, just about everything that ever mattered. The novel’s own quest is one in which we can happily lose—and find—ourselves." — San Francisco Chronicle "The novel is a profound success that manages to take its place in the canon of excellent war literature while also maintaining a kind of magical surreality . . . At moments, the narrative even veers into Gabriel García Márquez territory with its mastery of human complications and conditions, its holiness of unrequited love . . . This is an astounding read, a best–of, and a masterful treatise on enduring." — Lambda Literary "Raeff is a consummate storyteller, providing deep insight into her characters through her keen use of language and image. Depictions of places are similarly moving, both historically accurate and a vital part of the characters’ story. Readers’ emotions will run the gamut, rejoicing at quiet moments