A Winter's Night is a quiet book about trust and love and family. It is beautifully written and easy to get invested in the main character's life - both the highs and the lows. It's almost like getting in touch with a friend that you haven't seen in a long time and catching up on their life.

Angie Dugan is 34 years old and works as a social worker at a retirement home. She enjoys her job and is very good at it but isn't sure if she wants to keep doing it in the future. She has a difficult family and a poor self-opinion. She has just met a new man that she thinks she may have a future with but she questions herself and her feelings during every step of their new relationship. Because of past hurts she is afraid to trust him and is afraid to listen to what her heart is telling her. Along with her work at the retirement home, she helps to take care of her alcoholic father with the help of her brothers and, surprisingly, her mother who divorced him years before. Angie is a character that you'll feel happy for and at the same time want to cry with her as she navigates her new relationship with Matt. Will she be able to work through her issues and trust Matt with her heart? Is Matt even worth trusting or do his secrets show a side of him that can't be trusted. Read this book to enjoy the struggles and successes of a wonderful main character.

I didn't know until I read the reviews, that this author has written about the Dugan family in several other books. This book and the family were so intriguing, I plan to buy some of her earlier books to learn more about the struggles of the other family members. ( )

I was first introduced to the Dugan family in Anne Leigh Parrish's book of linked short stories, Our Love Could Light the World. The Dugan family story continued in the novel The Amendment. I loved both books, and so I really looked forward to a third meeting with the Dugans in A Winter Night.

A Winter Night focuses on 34 year-old Angie Dugan, who works as a social worker at a retirement/nursing home. Angie helps families and residents adjust to a new life. She's good at her job, even if it is not exactly what she wants to be doing with her life.

Angie is dating Matt, a younger bartender who is a real people person, a useful trait for his profession. Their relationship is fairly new, and Matt is a friend of one of Angie's younger brothers, which means they spend a lot of time with her brother and his girlfriend.

Trust is an issue for Angie in relationships. She's only had three serious relationships, and each ended on not great terms. Angie's mom Lavinia left the family for a time when the children were young, and then divorced her alcoholic husband Potter and married a wealthier man who later died after being struck by lightning on the golf course. Angie has always helped pick up the pieces of her father's life, even after he married a successful realtor.

Parrish's beautiful writing gives us such insight into Angie, as seen in this passage about Matt's apartment building:
"It reeks of the temporary, the rootless, somewhere people stay on their way to somewhere either better or worse. She's only channeling her own experience, though, of moving so often when she was growing up. Her family never seemed to stay anywhere longer than a year."
Angie "was told her honesty was a weapon, a means to hand out judgment that was seldom unbiased. Her mother said she liked to beat people up with her words." She sees a therapist to try and have a better understanding of herself.

When Potter relapses and starts drinking again, Angie does not want to be pulled back into the caretaker role she undertook when she was younger. Although Potter promises to stop drinking, as Lavinia says, his "promises are never false. They're just seldom kept."

Reading A Winter Night felt like going back to your hometown and catching up with an old friend. The Dugans live near the Finger Lakes region where I grew up, and that connection drew me in once again. Like Angie, I also grew up as the oldest of five children, and the Christmas dinner scene with all the siblings with all the family dynamics that entails is so relatable.

I highly recommend A Winter Night. It can be read as a stand alone novel, but do yourself a favor and read the two earlier books to get a deeper appreciation of the arc of the Dugan family story. I hope we get to read more about the rest of the Dugans in further stories, as Angie's story reminded me how much I missed them. ( )

I have been reading Anne Leigh Parrish's works for a long time, both her short stories and her novels. So I know what an accomplished writer she is and the way that she creates complex and intriguing characters. In this latest novel, A Winter Night, she is once again writing about one of the Dugans, a family she created many years ago and for whom she clearly has a big soft spot and an endless fascination. And although main character Angie Dugan has appeared on the page before, new readers need not fear; it is more than possible to read this novel as its own separate work.

Angie Dugan is 34. She works at Lindell retirement home and is vaguely dissatisfied with the job she once loved. She's in a new relationship but isn't entirely certain she wants to trust boyfriend Matt as much as a relationship needs in order to thrive. She's close to some of her siblings but not others and she worries terribly about her father as he relapses and starts drinking again. Angie doesn't have much faith in herself and that spills over into her personal relationships despite the fact that at heart, she is a caretaker.

This is very much a character study, the story of a woman who wants to learn to trust despite her struggles to do so. The narration is third person but firmly focused solely on Angie, her insecurities, anxieties, and fears, her brusque bluntness, and her hopes for the future. Angie can self-sabotage with the best of them and she seems unable to decide whether the red flags she sees in her relationship are legitimate or if they are her own creation. She is very different at work, sure, intuitive, and thoughtful, if burned out. Readers who are looking for action driving the plot will not find that here. It is much more a ruminative, interior sort of novel with Angie working out how she feels and how she wants to feel about her relationship with Matt, with her father, with her family, and about her job. She continues to be pulled into her family but keeps a cautious distance with everyone else around her. Is this what she wants though, or is she ready to risk herself? Even the oral history project plot thread, recording the memories of the elderly at Lindell, highlights relationship and love and the complexity of family, with one woman confessing to a decades old crime and another telling how she protected both her husband and her son in keeping the son's sexuality from his father. Parrish subtly highlights this theme over and over in Angie's story even as she slowly and carefully unwraps the layers of the past that surround both Angie and Matt. This is a quietly done, rewarding book and those who like to sit and savour their reads will find much to appreciate and enjoy. ( )