In the town of Lake Wachannabee, Ontario, lies the Winter Garden, home to matron Giggy Andrewes and her brood: her strung-out nephew Jem Waferly, his friend Cora, Chappy the whippet, two peacocks, and Jem's lover Rob, who lies convalescing after having had most of his flesh stripped away.
A mystery? Well, yes, it would be if only the characters weren't so easily distracted by the noir-ishly handsome chief inspector, the seductive female veterinarian and the dashing anthropology professor studying the Winter Garden's gorge.
The Winter Gardeners spend a summer of sultry afternoons nursing Rob, languidly drinking cocktails and trying to picture Nude Descending Staircase in their supposedly Cubist garden. Soon, however, they find themselves in a court room, where their family's values are on trial in a case reminiscent of that of Oscar Wilde.
'Throught the novel, Denisoff uses imagerylike a daredevil trapeze artist … The Winter Gardeners is a surreal soap opera, a sexual satire, an Impressionist painting. And it should not be missed.'
– Quill and Quire, starred review
Dennis Denisoff is the author of the novel Dog Years, a book of poetry, Tender Agencies, and two scholarly studies, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840-1940 and the forthcoming Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film 1850-1950 . He is one of the early members of the Kootenay School of Writing and he edited the first-ever collection of Canadian gay prose, Queeries .