43 pages • 1 hour read
A Week in Winter
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Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Henry and Nicola”
Henry and Nicola are a married couple, both doctors. They are happy together, even though they can’t conceive a child. One day, they’re both working in A&E when a man on drugs shoots himself and his girlfriend. Henry and Nicola are traumatized and take time away by responding to a job advert for a doctor on a cruise ship. On the ship, they get to travel all around the world. On one journey, a woman reveals that her two parents with whom she’s traveling have disabilities; the woman lied about their disabilities in order to give them a holiday from which they would otherwise be excluded. Henry and Nicola agree to keep the woman’s secret from the rest of the ship’s crew. Shortly after the family departs, the couple learns that the woman and her family intentionally drove into a wall and died. Henry and Nicola understand that they helped the woman have one last holiday before her suicide. Their trauma compounded, they leave their jobs and decide to take a holiday to recuperate, which leads them to Stone House.
At Stone House, the couple meets the local doctor, Dai Morgan, who has been called to attend Winnie and Lillian after their escapade. Henry and Nicola learn that Dr. Dai came over from Wales many years ago but will shortly be returning home. Dr. Dai tells them about his own regrets in medical practice, including not trusting his instincts about a woman in an abusive relationship. However, he learned to forgive himself later when he saved the life of a young boy.
Back at the house, Chicky tells the couple that a local boy, Shay O’Hara, is an expert on local birds. However, Shay has become very depressed and refuses to seek treatment. Later that night, Henry and Nicole wake and discover that Shay is standing on the cliff edge contemplating death by suicide. They greet him and ask him for advice on local birds, then convince him to come inside. The boy’s parents arrive, having found his suicide note. The next day, Shay agrees to be admitted to a hospital, and Henry and Nicola agree to take over Dr. Dai’s practice in Stoneybridge.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Anders”
Anders is a young Swedish man set to inherit his father’s prestigious accounting firm, Almkvist’s. However, his true passion is music. He stands out from the rest of his family, who are immaculate and stylish. He struggles to live up to his family’s expectations. One day, his mother announces that she’s leaving his father because he is “married to the company” (213). At university, Anders meets his new girlfriend, Erika. The couple visit Anders’s mother and her new husband together in London, and Anders becomes involved with the local folk music scene.
The following summer, Anders interns with his father and cousins to learn the business. He tries to get to know his father better, but his father doesn’t show any interest in Anders away from his work. Nonetheless, Anders and Erika arrange for Erika to come visit and meet him. Their meeting is cordial but impersonal, and Anders soon returns to university. The summer after that, Anders and Erika visit Greece. Erika tells him she’s found a job near their university, and Anders is disappointed she won’t be closer to his job in Stockholm. She expresses disdain for his loyalty to his family instead of finding his own path, and the couple breaks up. Soon after, Anders’s father has a heart attack and doesn’t fully recover; Anders is forced to step into his role as the new head of the company. He dislikes the work and feels trapped, leading him to take a holiday in Ireland.
While exploring the country, Anders meets a bus driver and music enthusiast named John Paul. John Paul explains that he wants to open a music venue, but he can’t because he needs to help his father run their farm. When Anders returns, he tries to engage his father about his holiday, but is rebuffed. Instead, he phones Erika to tell her about it, and he agrees to visit her. They visit an Irish pub together and listen to its music. Anders tries to reconcile with her, but his devotion to his father’s business is too great a divide.
One day, Anders researches John Paul’s home of Stoneybridge and decides to take a week away. He arrives at Stone House and gets to know the other guests. Freda and Anders take in some local music, and Anders performs a few songs. He tracks down John Paul and meets his father, who admits he doesn’t want to keep his farm but lives there only because he believes it’s what John Paul wants. Anders realizes the two men haven’t communicated properly, and he wonders if a similar situation has happened to him and his own father. When Anders returns to Stone House, he decides to give up his job and instead open an Irish pub in Sweden with Erika.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
This section opens with the story of the first couple, who are not particularly distinct and instead form two sides of one character (The Walls are another example of this structure). Like The Walls, Henry and Nicola live an upper-middle-class life in relative privilege, yet are practical and down to earth: “The guests all said that in a complicated world full of confusion and misunderstandings, Henry and Nicola stood out like two rocks in a stormy sea” (179). This stability is upended when the couple is faced with their shocking emergency room trauma, which leads them to pursue an escape from themselves and their lives, however grandiose that escape may be: namely, they become traveling doctors on a cruise ship. This experience allows them to show their kindness, compassion, and humanity to the elderly travelers on board who experience age-related illnesses and general disconnection from the world around them. However, their compassion takes a dangerous turn when Henry and Nicola are faced with the ethical conundrum of maintaining a dishonest facade for a family on board. The narrative uses small moments of foreshadowing preceding the second tragedy, with the narrator noting the foresight of the passenger who begs the couple to overlook her parents’ issues: “It would be, as Helen had foreseen, the same as before” (189). Although the passenger, Helen, was referring here to the life she was returning to, the narrative is really referring to a parallel murder-suicide like the one Henry and Nicola had already faced.
Once at Stone House, the couple form a relationship with one of the peripheral characters, Dr. Dai Morgan. Despite their shared career paths, Henry and Nicola are cautious about bonding over this particular element; instead, they are drawn to the life in Ireland that he has built. Dr. Dai admits his regrets, which unearth Henry and Nicola’s own traumas in parallel. He also shares his journey of Healing and Redemption, which prompts the couple to take on a similar journey with Shay O’Hara. When the couple make a real difference in the young man’s life, and the lives of his family, by extending their friendship, they find a sense of redemption and create the beginning of a new life there in Stoneybridge.
This Personal Transformation on Henry and Nicola’s part leads into the chapter on Anders’s transformation. Music is an influential force in Anders’s life from an early age, but it quickly becomes clear to him that his life is preordained in another direction: “They knew that Anders, as the heir and successor, would leave his piano and his nyckelharpa behind and go away to university to be groomed for the job that would one day be his” (211). Anders’s sense of disconnection from his father’s work is clear throughout his journey, and particularly from his father himself and his attitude toward living. Anders, much like Chicky and Corry, engages directly with the challenge of The Internal Versus External Self. He sees that his parents are completely dominated by their external personas, overshadowing even their own happiness: “Twenty years of life together, two decades of hope and dreams ending, and his parents were still acting out a role” (215). Anders’s girlfriend, Erika, is completely antithetical to this attitude, refusing to embody anything but her truest self. This contrast puts Anders at an intersection between two ways of life.
When Anders is forced into the rigidity of his career sooner than expected, his internal self with all its priorities becomes buried. Unlike the other characters, Anders visits Ireland on two separate occasions. The first serves to give Anders a connection to the place and its slower, more authentic way of living. It also further alienates Anders’s father and makes Anders more determined not to push such a life onto his own children. The next time he visits Ireland, he’s grown enough to take a broader perspective and be more honest with himself about his own needs.
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