Fires of Winter

Fires of Winter is a novel by the American writer Johanna Lindsey, published by Avon Books in 1980. It is the first book of her Haardrad Family Saga.

Brenna is a Celtic noblewoman whose household is destroyed when raiders arrive from across the sea, and the novel begins with her capture and with the vow she makes about the men who have taken her. Garrick is the son of the Viking chieftain and the man who takes an interest in her, and the book follows the two of them through a winter in the north, where the household he belongs to has its own rules and its own expectations about what happens to captives. Lindsey writes the conflict between the two of them as a contest of stubbornness, and the setting supplies the terms of it: a hall full of people who take slavery for granted, a religion and a culture that Brenna does not share, and the long dark season that allows no one to leave.

The author wrote a series of novels in this register from the late 1970s onwards, and this one began the Haardrad sequence, which follows the same family in later generations.