Fireflies in Winter - Hardcover

Shearer, Eleanor

 
9780593548073: Fireflies in Winter
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593548078 ISBN 13: 9780593548073
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Selected by the New York Times as a "Dazzling, Immersive New Historical Fiction" Title!

A gripping novel of two young women fighting for survival on the edge of the wilderness, and the love that simultaneously sustains them and threatens their very existence, from the author of the Good Morning America Book Club pick River Sing Me Home.

Nova Scotia, 1796. Cora, an orphan newly arrived from Jamaica, has never felt cold like this. In the depths of winter, everyone in her community huddles together in their homes to keep warm. So when she sees a shadow slipping through the trees, Cora thinks her eyes are deceiving her...until she creeps out into the moonlight and finds the tracks in the snow.

Agnes is in hiding. On the run from her former life, she has learned what it takes to survive alone in the wilderness. But she can afford no mistakes. When she first spies the young woman in the woods, she is afraid. Yet Cora is fearless, and their paths are destined to cross.

Deep among the cedars, Cora and Agnes find a fragile place of safety. But when Agnes's past closes in, they are confronted with the dangerous price of freedom--and of love....

With evocative prose and immersive storytelling, Fireflies in Winter is a powerful novel about love--love for the wilderness in all its unforgiving beauty, and love between two women who risk everything to be together.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer and the granddaughter of Windrush generation immigrants. She splits her time between London and Ramsgate on the English coast so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea. For her master's degree in politics at the University of Oxford, Eleanor studied the legacy of slavery and the case for reparations.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Trial

January 1798

Halifax County Court is a stage waiting for its players. The judge’s place is empty, as is the dock, enclosed on all sides but one. This is where the accused will stand. The room carries the weight of its past, all it has witnessed, leaving it hard and cold. Winter winds rattle loose windowpanes. Dark wood-paneled walls remember the methodical dissection of every kind of crime. Killers and crooks, robbers and the robbed, victims and perpetrators alike have all wet the uneven floor with their tears, lifted their gaze to the rafters and prayed.

The public benches are almost deserted, but a young woman waits there. It is, of course, a waiting kind of place—for confessions, for verdicts, for justice. Her eyes dart between the clerk in the corner and the two white men who stand in hushed conversation at the front, a lawyer and his client. She cannot stay still, one moment leaning forward in her seat, the next sitting back and gripping the bench with both hands. She breathes with some difficulty, the sign of a chill settled on the lungs.

The door to the courtroom opens. Everyone falls as silent as the snow-covered streets outside.

As the accused is brought in, she keeps her hands behind her, as if bound, but when she reaches the dock, she holds its sides to steady herself. They have left her free for now, though red welts of worn skin at her wrists betray that she has recently been chained. On the public benches, the young woman is on her feet. She says a name. The accused looks up. Their eyes meet. They cannot move from where they are, but their gazes cling to each other with the desperation of the drowning. All the accumulated history of the courtroom, the vast body of past crimes, recedes, and something vital and singular shines through. These two women. This case. The whole world might as well hang in the balance; the whole world might as well be awaiting the arrival of the judge, for the trial to begin.

Winter

1796-97

The air smells of salt and fish on the edge of rot, their carcasses piled high and stinking in the market. But it is the noise that assaults Cora-the noise and the crowds, wagons trundling over mud and stone, shouts from the drunks crowding the taverns, the distant sound of drums and pipers as the militia parade up Citadel Hill. Squat wooden houses, peeling brown and yellow paint, flank the streets. Rising up the hill are grander buildings, made of slate; the morning's frost, now melted, turns them dark and foreboding. All the people have hard, weathered faces, and they walk at a tilt, angled into the bitter wind.
Cora passes stalls with slaughtered sheep and pigs. Barrels of oats. Shops-the tanner, the dressmaker, the dry goods store. Her trip here has been in vain, still no flour to be bought in the city. She misses home with a dull ache, everything in Halifax reminding her only of what has been lost: bright-colored fruits and crystal-clear mountain streams. She has forgotten how it feels to be warm. . . .

A hand seizes her by the lapel of her woolen coat. Cora starts but does not shrink or cower. She stares directly into the face of the white man who has stopped her, their heights almost the same.

"Quite a way from the Negro quarter, aren't you, girl?"

His features sharp, a mean set to his mouth.

"Papers," he says.

"Let go-"

"Papers," he repeats. "Where are your papers, girl?"

The eyes of strangers slide over her, indifferent to her plight. She swallows anger as she pulls herself free.

"Me no have papers."

The white man is thrown, briefly, by something. Perhaps her lack of deference; the way she has, all this time, held his gaze. Or perhaps it is the unfamiliar accent, the rise and fall of it where he expects broad, flat tones.

He is the one who looks away first.

"In that case-"

Cora puts a hand on her chest.

"Maroon," she says. "From Jamaica."

It hurts a little, the name in her mouth. Home.

The man still stands too close, slow to understand.

"Free," Cora says firmly.

It might not be enough. She has learned that the people in this place don't know what Jamaicans know. Can't always accept her status as something different than the others with skin like hers. But luck is on her side. A shout from close by. The man turns; a fellow inspector tussles with a ragged-clothed man, someone who looks more like the runaway type. Cora is left as the white man hurries to help with the arrest. She doesn't want to watch. She walks away and lets the market crowd swallow her.


She leaves the city empty-handed, huddled on the Dartmouth ferry, freezing; she still doesn’t have the knack for this weather, is without a hat or gloves, her thin layers inadequate to warm her. Hard waves knock the sides of the boat. Impossible to believe that this water is the same as the water that breaks on the sands of home.

Will she ever return?

Cora oscillates between determination and despair. Some days, she thinks she would swim the distance if she could. That nothing could stop her from clawing her way back-that she would rather die in the attempt than resign herself to a life on these forbidding shores. But then there are the dark days, the days when she can hardly rise from her bed, when she lies motionless, listening to the roaring wind or driving rain outside, or when fog presses close around the windows, and she cannot imagine ever seeing her island again.

2

The problem is that she is not paying attention. Taking a shortcut, off the main road from Dartmouth toward Preston, but her mind is following the forest paths of Trelawny Town in Jamaica, retracing old steps. The cold draws her into herself-cutting off the feeling in her fingers and toes, a spreading numbness as though the inessential parts of herself are falling away and she will be left with only her core. And the core of her has always been the forests of home.

Lost in the past, she does not realize she has taken a wrong turn until it is too late. Until, looking around, she thinks that these spruce trees are not as they should be. The uncanny feeling of familiar shapes turned slightly strange-just enough to make the world around her feel unreal, like the illusion of another distorted landscape in the surface of rippling water.

She stops. Looks around, inwardly cursing. But not so bad, surely. She can retrace her steps, she is sure of it. She looks up at the gray sky, trying to calculate the angle of a sun half-hidden by cloud-and that is when she feels something land on her face. A pinprick of cold.

The winter's first snow.

Cora stands for a while and watches it fall, the flakes so slow it makes the heavy, pounding rains of Jamaica feel like a distant memory.

Overhead, the sky seems lower. Cora recalls a folk story, of a time when people could reach up and pick pieces of the sky like ripe fruit and eat it, so no one ever went hungry. The story can't be her mother's, but Cora imagines for a moment that it might be. That somehow, twenty years ago, a woman laid a hand on the swell of her belly and whispered things, making herself heard through layers of skin, speaking of lions and trickster gods and the very beginning of the earth.

The flakes settle on her face and hair fleetingly before they melt away. The paths are beginning to disappear under the dusting of white. She is already lost. How will she find the right way now?

Some, at this point, would start to panic, but Cora's is not a mind so easily unsettled. She prides herself on taking things as she finds them. Has little patience for those who worry, where getting to work will do. So, nothing for it but to walk.

She sets off, back in the direction she came.


By the changing quality of the light, Cora guesses that another hour has...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593548078
ISBN 13 
9780593548073
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
BERKLEY
https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY

Unit 2 Limavady Business Park
Limavady
County Londonderry
BT49 0HR
Vereinigtes Königreich
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781472291462: Fireflies in Winter: A breathtaking novel of survival, hope and the enduring power of love from the author of River Sing Me Home

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1472291468 ISBN 13:  9781472291462
Verlag: Headline Review, 2026
Hardcover