MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Northern blights
JOHN GREEN is fascinated to read a crime thriller written from the point of view of Europe’s northern indigenous people
Sami Reindeer herding, Sweden
[Mats Andersson]
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Stolen
By Ann-Helen Laestadius
Bloomsbury Circus, £18.99
THE SAMI people inhabit the region of Sapmi, encompassing northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola peninsula. The region was formerly known as Lapland, and the Sami known in English as Lapps or Laplanders, but these terms are, today, deemed offensive.
This novel tells the story of a girl growing up in a Sami family and the story is told largely by her. Elsa lives in the north of Sweden and is a nine-year-old Sami girl when the narrative begins, maturing into an adult by the end.
Like many of the families here, herding reindeer is the family’s chief means of livelihood, but a malevolent Swedish poacher who lives in the vicinity sees the wild-roaming herds as a source of cheap income for himself. The unfolding conflict between him and the family is at the centre of what becomes a tension-filled crime story even if the only murder victims are the reindeer.
Like so many minority peoples, the Sami find their culture and traditional ways of life challenged and under pressure from modernity, discrimination, and racist attitudes.
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