She believes he died in Europe, so she has managed to carry on, holding down a very respectable job designing ships. Instead we focus on Neil MacRae, a disgraced soldier who has returned to Halifax, where his lover (and also his cousin) Penelope Wain still lives. It is still one of the largest non-atomic explosions in history, or something like that.īut we are not following the crew of this ill-fated vessel. It was a horrific event: a munitions ship collided with a relief vessel and caught fire, but only a few people knew what was really inside, so lots of people were out on the street watching the ship burn when it exploded. The story takes place from a few days before to a day or so after the Halifax Explosion, which occurred on December 6, 1917. CanLit is not even 70 years old at the time this review is being written, and look at all the things we've accomplished! It's amazing.Īmazing also describes this book well. The foreword sets the stage when it says that this book "is one of the first ever written to use Halifax, Nova Scotia, as its sole background." Then it blew my mind by saying that there was "as yet no tradition of Canadian literature" at the time Barometer Rising was originally published (1941). From the very beginning of Barometer Rising, you can tell this is a singular book.
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