THE FOURTH WINTER     
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Nearly three decades after surviving a Himalayan winter that changed the course of his life, novelist Cohen Benjamin returns to India with editor Valery Rockford, writer Conrad Kirk, and martial artist Brett Lloyd-Ronan. Their purpose is simple, in principle: discover what really happened in the mountains during the winter of 1988–89.

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But memory is an imperfect witness, and Cohen has spent a lifetime turning experience into fiction. As police reports, old records, remembered conversations, and long-buried truths begin to challenge the stories he has told himself and others, the journey becomes an inquiry into grief, friendship, love, artistic responsibility, and the consequences of choices that cannot be rewritten.

The Fourth Winter is a literary novel about the stories we create to survive the past—and what happens when those stories become refuges from accountability.

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The past has another witness: Cohen’s own work. In the hands of his editor and companion, Valery, fragments frozen in amber from across his literary career begin to reveal not merely how he transformed experience—and people whose lives had intersected with his own—into fiction, but what he understood long before taking responsibility for it.

 

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Paris, San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, India, Gabriola Island ... no matter where we go... there we are....