Land of Snow and Ashes

The haunting, gripping story of Lapland's buried history of Nazi crimes during World War II, perfect for fans of Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius

“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

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 Sámi people in the Finnish media. Land of Snow and Ashes is her debut novel and is currently being translated into ten languages.

David Hackston is a British translator of Finnish and Swedish literature and drama. He graduated from University College London with a degree in Scandinavian Studies and now lives in Helsinki where he works as a freelance translator. Notable publications include the Anna Fekete trilogy by Kati Hiekkapelto and My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing by Pajtim Statovci, both published by Pushkin Press.