Walter Biggins at The Quarterly Conversation:
In capturing the voices, travails, and eventual connection of two lonelyhearts, Guadalupe Nettel’s After the Winter captures the spirit of urban loneliness so vividly that it’s often painful to read. But, as with her story collection Natural Histories (2013) and novel The Body Where I Was Born (2011), Nettel casts a sardonic, cocked eye at all the sadness. She’s funny, wickedly so, just as much as she shows us these lonely souls from the perspectives of others.
Nettel’s alternate points-of-view are initially hard to see, as After the Winter is resolutely told from the first-person. The chapters alternate between Claudio, a Cuban expat in New York, and Cecilia, a Mexican expat in Paris. The narratives build separately as they evoke their funny, sad lives, until the moment that these lives—and their love and loin—converge. Until that union, these two are trapped in their own heads and cluttered apartments.
more here.