Author(s): Petra Rautiainen

Novel | Historical | Translated fiction | Finland

A hauntingly beautiful, gripping novel about Lapland's buried history of Nazi crimes against the Sami people.

Finnish Lapland, 1944: a young Finnish soldier is called to work as an interpreter at a Nazi prison camp. Surrounded by cruelty and death, he struggles to hold on to 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.

But the villagers don't want to dwell on the past, and Inkeri's questions provoke hostility and suspicious silences. As she learns more about her mysterious tenant, Olavi, and tries to befriend a young Sami girl, she 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.

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

'Stuns its readers with details of the events and conditions at the prison camps... A delicate and artfully composed story of painful, obscure and dangerous events in recent history; events which have been silenced up until now' - Lapin Kansa

Author Biography: 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 areas, 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.