Dual timeline novel set around the world
Historical novel set around Halifax, NOVA SCOTIA
8th December 2025
Fireflies in Winter by Eleanor Shearer, historical novel set around Halifax, NOVA SCOTIA.
I read the author’s debut novel: River Sing Me Home and it was so good that it has gone into TripFiction’s Hall of Fame. A wonderfully told story with an incredible sense of place. A real tour de force of storytelling.
Fireflies in Winter is set in the later 1790s. Cora is newly arrived from Jamaica, to Preston, Halifax, She is nominally cared for by Leah, who takes over the role of mother and caregiver, as Cora is an orphan. They are part of a larger community, struggling to deal with the cold temperatures in this comparatively inhospitable landscape.
Cora is out and about and there is an ethereal quality to her wanderings. She senses a presence in the forest and this turns out to be Agnes, who is on the run. After a while a kind of trust between them ensues and their relationship develops into a friendship with an overlay of intimacy.
Fireflies in Winter is as much their story, an unfolding exploration of feelings, as it is about the notion of slavery, freedom and society in that period, all set against a terrific backdrop of landscape.
A hundred or so pages in, I was already bowled over by the atmospheric and textured backdrop.
“Cora realizes how much she thinks of Agnes as a shadow”.
The story gently moves along whilst the characters go about their lives behind a kind of gossamer veil, a mist – perhaps intentional, a nod to the echoey and muted landscape that prevails when the ground is covered in ice, peering through the curtain of falling snow (when the chapters are set in the Winter months).
I certainly did learn some things through reading the novel, yet I yearned for a greater robustness in bringing the historical backdrop to life, something that – for me – would have given the story a more solid foothold and anchor (as I know very little about that particular period in history). The writing is very beautiful and luminous and that is what carried me through the novel.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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