Before I began writing this, I did a search of my own blog to see if I had reviewed a Maeve Binchy book previous to this one, and I was surprised to find that I hadn’t. But I read all of them for the first time so many years ago that I guess they predate the inception of my becoming an independent reviewer. I am sure that I probably reviewed some for my library’s blog once upon a time, but after my retirement the new and “progressive” library director decided that a book review blog was unnecessary for a library (yeah, just ponder that for a minute) and discontinued it, so that legacy is lost.

I did find, however, that I had mentioned various writers and their books in connection to her, most of them falling short of the simple genius that was Maeve’s gift; usually, the publisher’s blurb that this or that tome was “perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy” just led to disappointment and unfavorable comparisons.

A Week in Winter is unfortunately her last book; she wrote it in early 2012, then passed away unexpectedly that July, and the book came out in October. She suffered terribly from osteoarthritis in her latter years, and also had heart disease, and died of a heart attack after hip surgery at age 72. But before that she wrote 17 novels, half a dozen short story collections, and a couple of plays, and was also a columnist for The Irish Times for about a decade. I started reading her in the ’90s, I think, and mostly kept up with every novel she wrote, with a couple of exceptions. But I somehow never went back and read this one, so when it came up on the Facebook “Friends and Fiction” page, it was a welcome reminder to do so.

It’s hard to say why her books are such genius—they are set in Ireland, either in the country or in Dublin, and center around family life, small businesses, and the tensions between Irish rural and urban life as influenced by the cultural changes that took place from World War II to the new century. They are small stories, in the sense that they focus in on one protagonist and the people—family, friends, work colleagues—directly connected to them in some way, and are both wholesome and somewhat uneventful, in contrast to so much that’s currently being published—no mysteries or thrills here. But Binchy had a way of understanding universals and then bringing them home at an intimate level that spoke to people, and with a couple of exceptions I have read her books two and three times to remind myself of how much I received from them.

This latest built on a formula she had used before, in which she began with the story of one character who she explored in detail, and then branched out to incorporate short vignettes of the lives of those who revolved around this character for some reason. She did it in her popular book Evening Class, which features Nora (known as Signora) as a teacher of Italian and then explores the back stories of all the students who enroll in her night class, going on to send them all together on a trip to Italy.

In A Week in Winter, the protagonist is Chicky Starr, who decides to turn an old mansion on the western coast of Ireland into a small hotel; the second half of the story develops around the people she recruits to help her, and all the guests who book in for the first week the hotel is open. But first we get the story of Chicky—who she meets and loves, why she leaves her family home in Stoneybridge and ends up in an impersonal existence in a boarding house in New York City, and what brings her back to Ireland to set up as a hotelier.

I will say that while I enjoyed reading this, it wasn’t my favorite of Binchy’s by a long shot; while I do like this formula, I find that I have preferred her novels that focus more closely on one set of people and don’t bring in so many attenuated stories of strangers to fill their pages—books such as Firefly Summer, Tara Road, The Glass Lake, and Scarlet Feather. But there was definitely an appealing story line that wended its way through all the connected lives, and it also made me want to travel to Chicky’s place and spend my own week in its comfortable, well-heated rooms, eating Orla’s good cooking, taking bird-watching walks along the rugged coastline, and finding a pub alive with good Irish music for an evening’s entertainment.

If you haven’t experienced Binchy’s books, you might be wondering what is so special about them. I don’t know that I can adequately explain it: They are cozy but not sappy, unchallenging but not unintelligent; and the characters and stories are so engaging that they make you want to know these people—frequent their restaurants and hotels and shops, live in their neighborhoods, have a mid-morning coffee break with them. The only writer whose name comes up consistently when anyone says they want to read someone who writes like Maeve Binchy is another of my favorites, Rosamunde Pilcher. They also remind me of a more old-fashioned version of Jenny Colgan’s books, but slightly less twee. (No offense to Colgan—I love her books—but they aren’t quite as universal as those of Binchy or Pilcher.)

If you haven’t read Binchy, don’t start with this one—pick one of the ones I named above, with characters you stick with throughout. Oprah featured Tara Road as one of her book club books in 1999, which may account for the exponential growth of Binchy’s readership; but I think she would have been a big seller, regardless. Try one and see if you agree.