Paris in the 1930s: Louis Grandeville has a beautiful wife, a nice home, a loyal servant, and a large circle of well-placed friends. His financial situation doesn't require him to work. Yet Louis is obsessed by the nagging reality that he never has and never will amount to anything.

He believes his life is devoid of any affection, of any goal, filled instead with a thousand trifles intended to relieve its monotony, populated with human beings he seeks out to avoid being alone but for whom he cares little.

The "Winter" of the title is in fact a period of four months during which, every few days, Louis commits to paper the minute details of his unhappy marriage. Although his wife, Madeleine, is the focal point of his journal, and his preoccupation with the minutiae of her life, mind, and body is dangerously obsessive, his painstakingly rendered analyses of her behavior tell us far more about him than about her, and about the harm two people can do to each other.

In its exploration of one of the riskiest of all human transactions - a stable relationship between two people of the opposite sex - A Winter's Journal is one of the most unsparing novels ever written on the self-destructive impulse present in all marriages.