What readers think of Love Begins in Winter, plus links to write your own review.

This beautifully written book of just five short love stories captured my heart. Each is very different from the others, as each one focuses on a different kind of love in poignant, almost visceral ways. But they have one thing in common: They are all about the pain of loneliness and the salvation of love.

• "Love Begins in Winter" tells the story of a famous and accomplished cellist, who still mourns the loss of his childhood friend, Anna, when she was 12 years old. This achingly lonely man senses her presence with him on stage until one day in the oddest of ways he meets Hannah, a woman who is mourning her own childhood loss. These two people find each other and in the process find themselves.

• "Tiger Tiger" is the story of a woman in a committed relationship—with no intention of marriage—and how they navigate her partner's parents' rocky marriage and divorce. Let's just put it this way: The woman has a bizarre way of showing her affection.

• "The Missing Statues" tells the tale of a single mother and her four-year-old son, who are waiting outside a Las Vegas casino for her latest boyfriend, who has taken all her money for gambling. They wait all night. And then near dawn a gondolier from the Venetian Hotel and Casino approaches them and something magical happens in the love and care he shows them.

• "The Coming and Going of Strangers" is the story of young Walter, who takes one look at a young orphan girl from Canada who has moved with her younger sister to Walter's hometown of Wicklow on the east coast of Ireland and falls hopelessly in love. The ending is both predictable and surprising. And the backstory of Walter's family is a study in the love of community when prejudice should have gotten in the way.

• "The City of Windy Trees" tells about the life of sad, lonely, and isolated George Frack of New York City who receives the most unexpected news in a letter from Stockholm: He is the father of a five-year-old girl, the result of a one-night stand six years ago at a truck stop in upstate New York. What he does next is life-changing for him, the girl, and the girl's mother.

As different as these stories are from one another, the shared thread is the tendency of each of the main characters to give up, to live their life in isolation. Instead, when strangers come into their lonely world, they are able to find their dreams. Author Simon Van Booy writes with keen insight into the human heart…witty, wise, and tender.