The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash

The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash

An evocative and wildly absorbing novel about the Winters, a family living in New York City's famed Dakota apartment building in the year leading up to John Lennon's assassination

It's the fall of 1979 in New York City when twenty-three-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton's father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from a breakdown. Before long, Anton is swept up in an effort to reignite Buddy's stalled career, a mission that takes him from the gritty streets of New York, to the slopes of the Lake Placid Olympics, to the Hollywood Hills, to the blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and brings him into close quarters with the likes of Johnny Carson, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and a seagoing John Lennon.

But the more Anton finds himself enmeshed in his father's professional and spiritual reinvention, the more he questions his own path, and fissures in the Winter family begin to threaten their close bond. By turns hilarious and poignant, The Dakota Winters is a family saga, a page-turning social novel, and a tale of a critical moment in the history of New York City and the country at large.

Tom Barbash is the author of three books and numerous reviews, stories, essays, and articles for journals such as McSweeney's, Tin House, the Believer, Narrative Magazine, One Story, StoryQuarterly, Zyzzyva, the Missouri Review, Story Magazine, Men's Journal, ESPN the Magazine, BookForum, and the New York Times. It was chosen for summer book clubs by British GQ, British Vogue, and British Harper's Bazaar. His novel The Last Good Chance (Picador USA) won the California Book Award, was named a Publishers Weekly and Anniston Star Best Book of the Year, and was nominated for the Great Lakes Book Prize and the Saroyan International Prize. The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The James Michener Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts have all given him fellowships.