City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Land of snow & ashes, Petra Rautiainen ; translated from the Finnish by David Hackston

eng

no index present

fiction

Land of snow & ashes

Petra Rautiainen ; translated from the Finnish by David Hackston

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 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. 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

Land of snow and ashes