Land of Snow and Ashes

Description

Finnish Lapland, 1944: a young soldier is called to work as an interpreter at a Nazi prison camp. Surrounded by cruelty and death, he struggles to hold onto his humanity. When peace comes, the crimes are buried beneath the snow and ice. A few years later, journalist Inkeri is assigned to investigate the rapid development of remote Western Lapland. Her real motivation is more personal: she is following a lead on her husband, who disappeared during the war. Finding a small community riven with tension and suspicious of outsiders, Inkeri slowly begins to uncover traces of disturbing facts that were never supposed to come to light. From this starkly beautiful polar landscape emerges a story of silenced histories and ongoing oppression, of human brutality and survival.

PETRA RAUTIAINEN was born in 1988 in a small town in Eastern Finland. Petra has travelled around the world, studied in the UK and worked in Canada, New Zealand and Scotland. Since childhood, she has been inspired by the barren nature of the Arctic, and hiking is her greatest passion. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on representations of the Sami people in the Finnish media. Land of Snow and Ashes is her debut novel and is currently being translated into ten languages.

'Reveals so much more about a war we thought we knew that it feels like a potted epic' - Guardian 'Evocative... an amalgam of detective story and history, which absorbs the reader from start to finish' - TLS 'A beautifully written novel and a thriller that will keep readers turning the page to find out the truth about this disgraceful chapter of Finnish history' - Harvard Review 'A strong, intense thriller plot... depicts the controversial landscape of 1940s Lapland ambitiously and beautifully' - Helsingin Sanomat 'Beautiful... a chapter in history that has rarely been visible in fiction... Rautiainen succeeds in describing the history of Finland's colonization and also gives a voice to the Sami' - Loostas