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Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale (storyline here) is a powerful and magical book, an epic story of love, beauty and justice, and the ability - or more accurately - the necessity for these qualities to exist within each us and across all of time.

Know what I mean? No. Because Winter's Tale was not meant to be summed up in a sentence or even a book review. Helprin plumbs the depths of language as he masterfully unravels his century-spanning human drama. Even the blurb written for the novel's back cover falls terribly short, and if you think the movie version of Winter's Tale (starring Colin Farrell as Peter Lake) will do this story justice, you're mistaken. Don't sell yourself short. Read this book.

Winter's Tale begins with Peter Lake, a burglar and perhaps the best burglar in all of New York City during the Belle Epoque, that time of peace and prosperity preceding the first World War. Peter Lake is no ordinary burglar and no ordinary man. And one could ask for no better protagonist - raised by the indigenous clam diggers of New Jersey's Bayonne Marsh, educated by a reverend whose primary objects of worship are structural engineering and metalworking, and forcibly conscripted into the Short Tails, the gang of criminals who for ten years schooled him in a variety of unorthodox trades and thereafter tirelessly hunted him through the streets of New York, Peter Lake is a charming rogue with a bit of an Irish brogue and a sense of humor to match, inexplicably intermingling the sensibilities of an honest workingman with the resourcefulness of a thief.

There is a white horse, who may or may not have the power of flight and a cloud wall raging just outside the Bayonne Marsh that has the ability to swallow trains, ships and people and move them, indeterminately, through time. At the heart of Winter's Tale, there is a love story between Peter Lake and 17-year-old Beverly Penn, the daughter of newspaper mogul, Isaac Penn. Peter Lake’s and Beverly’s love for one another is immediate, absolute, and doomed, as Beverly is stricken with consumption, and the story of their love for each other ends, tragically, with the first book of the novel.