Praise for The Architects Are Here

National Bestseller

A Globe and Mail Best Book

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Toronto Life Best of Fall

“‘The novel can do simply everything,’ Henry James wrote under the heading, the Future of the Novel, more than 100 years ago …. What Henry James wrote is worth remembering now when you read Michael Winter’s The Architects Are Here, because this flamboyant gem of a novel is so wide-angled and crowded with dramatic incident that it’s likely to stretch even an unusually generous reader’s literate mind and loving heart beyond normal limits…. That puts him right alongside Barbara Gowdy in the front rank of writers worth reading no matter how daunting and inhospitable the terrain their stories take readers across.”

—The Globe and Mail

“SUPREME ORIGINALITY, SHATTERING INSIGHT:With the publication of his latest novel, The Architects Are Here, Newfoundland’s Michael Winter is well on his way to having one of the most distinctive voices in Canadian literature…. The Architects Are Here is … at once familiar and innovative, a dissection of lives born in between the Newfoundland of old and new…. The glory of Winter is his writing style, a sharp-edged yet brittle prose that cannot be quickly summarized…. Like a poem, Winter’s prose must wash over the reader in its entirety, letting his asides and quick-cut thought edits bounce around in the reader’s mind, quietly revealing character through humour warm yet grim…. Already in his short professional life, Winter has burst through the pack with his startling personal mix of lyrical cadence, imagination and warmth. The Architects Are Here is proof positive that Winter is something special.”

—Winnipeg Free Press

“Mesmerizing … 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.”

—Calgary Herald

“Best of Fall; The Fabulist: Novelist Michael Winter Tackles Rivalry and Romance. [The Architects Are Here is] brainy and ambitious—just like its author.”

—Toronto Life

“The Architects are Here reveals a new maturity and sophistication in [Winter’s] writing.”

—cbc.ca

“A soaring novel that breaks every rule… it absolutely soars, with catharsis, resonance and unexpected resolution. … [A] fulfilling read…. Winter has tapped the ineffable. The Architects Are Here is not modelled on fiction, but rooted in the guts and hurly-burly of life, capturing that experience as few novels do.… It is less a novel than it is a force of nature, a bloody, ugly, ultimately uplifting taste of life itself.”

—Robert Wiersema, National Post

“It’s a mature book, in Winter’s mastery of his devastatingly effective prose style and sprawling, entrancing plot and in the concerns of his thirtysomething characters. It’s big and ambitious and exciting: it’s a Toronto novel and a Newfoundland novel and a road novel all rolled into one; a love triangle and a buddy story and a revenge epic; a boozy, funny portrait of achingly true characters you might have a beer with playing out their lives on a widescreen scale.”

—Eye Weekly

“The Architects Are Here cements the author’s position as one of our very best…”

—Edmonton Journal

“[A] wonderfully distinctive voice….”

—The Gazette (Montreal)

“The quintessential road-trip novel…”

—Times-Colonist (Victoria, BC)

“Winter is the architect of this book, and though all the characters attempt to gain control, there is an implicit hopelessness haunting them on every page. Freud and the ancient Greek tragedians would appreciate the manner and style of the relentless destiny he determines for the Twomblys. Michael Winter is a skilled and confident author, adept with detail and incisive with observations. His characters are true and magnificently flawed, and his writing is peppered with random observations of the bizarre, with which life is often replete.”

—Women’s Post

“His third novel, The Architects Are Here, can do little but burnish his literary halo.… Michael Winter is a fascinating writer who takes chances…. Like fine brandy, it is hard to read just one Winter novel. When you finish this one, take a tip from me and look him up in the ‘Ws’ of your local library’s fiction section.”

—The Sun Times (Owen Sound, ON)

“Those who enjoy … Winter’s talent for ‘linguistic pointillism’ will find much to enjoy here. They will also find, for the first time, a contemporary narrative about larger-than-life characters embroiled in a plot that reaches mythic proportions. This is Winter’s most fictional fiction to date, and it is written with tremendous confidence.”

—Quill & Quire

“There is also, of course, the expected linguistic playfulness of Winter’s style … and his ability to make metaphoric leaps that reveal something of the essential nature of things.”

—The Independent (St. John’s, NL)