There’s a bleakly beautiful quality to many stories set in northern climes in winter, a dark, dreamlike state that can settle over the entire narrative. I first felt it in the novel Smilla’s Sense of Snow, and it’s palpable in most Scandi Noir TV crime series. You also feel it from the first page to the last in Sheila Graham-Smith’s translucent novel, If, After Snow, set in the Annapolis Valley and published by Askance in 2025.
As I write this, the temperature in Northern Nova Scotia sits in the double digits below zero. Winter’s darkness falls early and completely. The shore ice is cracking, sometimes with sharp, breaking-glass splinters, and sometimes in low thrumming woofs that hit deep in the chest. Among many Indigenous peoples, storytelling is reserved for winter.[1] The reasons are partly practical. But they’re also an age-old recognition of relationality: wind, ice, dark, and cold are not merely “environmental.” They’re agentic. They’re characters, as Graham-Smith makes clear. And the relationships formed or broken between people huddled together for warmth and mutual support during this season develop in interaction with those hibernal characters.
“No breath of wind, No gleam of sun – Still the white snow whirls softly down… Twig and bough and blade and thorn all in an icy quiet, forlorn” (283).
For all our exposure to wind-chill factors and our jokes about shovelling driveways, we Canadians have not always cultivated the intimacy with winter’s vicissitudes and possibilities that characterises other northern cultures. Graham-Smith quietly but firmly redresses that possible omission in “If, After Snow.” The book’s enigmatic cover could be an overexposed photograph taken during a whiteout. The plot unfolds like gently falling snow gathering momentum until arriving at the inevitable storm and its morning-after digging out.
The novel is set in late winter along a snow-bound stretch of the Fundy Coast. Carl Zoëga, facing a terminal illness in his 90th winter, has fled the seniors’ complex in Montreal where his well-meaning son Coby placed him to live out his final weeks with his daughter Miriam, a world-class cellist and experimental composer, at his summer home in the Annapolis Valley. In the neighbouring farm, Kip, a writer who has also taken winter refuge, is struggling to understand his life in light of a collapsed marriage, the death of his own father, and his consequent writers’ block.
Of course, the protagonists meet. With her preternaturally pale skin, her snowy hair, and her half-wild attention to the natural world and comfort in silence, Miriam physically embodies winter. Carl is a native Icelandic speaker, and stranger neither to winter, nor to a certain type of stoic Scandinavian philosophy. He represents the wisdom not only of his years, but also of the way that fate chose him, decades earlier, to be the father of Miriam and Coby.
“Not much can prepare a person for death but love is most effective. Only in those two instances do we give ourselves so completely to the unknown. To the other. And in the case of love, we do it willingly, so it’s like a practice run” (Carl, 155).
Carl had been a 60s-something single man placing groceries into his car when a desperate-looking young woman got her grocery cart stuck in the snow beside him. She asked him to watch the cart and a baby and older sister while she ran back to the store for her purse. She never returned, and Carl became the parent of two children “in none of the usual ways.”
Although the novel’s point of view shifts between protagonists, and the reader is privy to the thoughts of all the characters, it is Kip with his stumbling questions and his fears of mortality who most stands in for the reader. Carl’s – and sometimes Miriam’s – words to Kip are intended for us. The conversations between the three turn out to be as beautiful and delicately fragile as winter hoarfrost.
“the world continues to offer itself as solace for what can’t be cured” (Miriam, 254).
My only moments of readerly disengagement with this extraordinary novel happened during its penultimate pages, during those conversations I was most enjoying. The ability of nearly all the characters at that point to recall complex philosophical arguments in their entirety and never to stoop to banality or small talk (or to ribald humour, a well-loved Maritime trait) at times broke the spell Graham-Smith had otherwise so successfully cast for most of the book.
The author leaves us with both a quiet life wisdom and a profound learning reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson in Gilead. Kip’s writerly realization – and his breakthrough in his fear of death – is perhaps Graham-Smith’s nod to the writers’ craft:
“he had been looking, he realised, not for language to acknowledge life, but language to contain it” (Kip, 319).
If, After Snow successfully acknowledges life, and hope, and love – and even spring – while never trying to control or contain any of them. The novel ends with a funeral, and yet it is not (as Byron would have had it) therefore a tragedy. Perhaps this is because of a quiet glimmer of relational warmth in the final pages. But for me the theme is found more in the Icelandic phrase from Carl that Miriam repeats as an epithet at the funeral, and which brings us back to the gift of how this is a properly Canadian winter novel. Halda fyrir veðri: “stand before the wind.” “We used to stand on what we called the seaward ramparts of Fort Anne,’ Miriam says, “holding hands, in blustery weather. For exercise, Carl said. For practise (335).”
“Stand before the wind…for practise.”
In all those dark, Nordic narratives, winter is not really an enemy. Its hardships are real, but they’re ultimately generative. Winter, the season, is a chance to listen, to gather together, to tell stories, and to hold on. The title If, After… (an allusion to the Sappho fragment and Anne Carson book If not, Winter) says it all. Sheila Graham-Smith’s novel is a bleakly beautiful reminder to hold fast to one another in whatever winters we experience, and to always practise love, but especially in the face of death.
Matthew Anderson
January 2026
[1] Bob Joseph, Indigenous Corporate Training: https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/11-things-you-should-know-about-aboriginal-oral-traditions
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