Land of Snow and Ashes

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

'Reveals so much more about a war we thought we knew that it feels like a potted epic' Guardian

This is a story of silenced histories, of dark secrets in a land of midnight sun.

Finnish Lapland, 1947: Inkeri arrives in remote Enontekiö on a journalistic assignment, but her real motivation is more personal - this is where her husband was last seen before he disappeared during the war.

As her probing questions meet with silence and hostility, Inkeri begins to investigate the fault-lines in this small community. Her burgeoning friendship with a young Sámi girl helps her piece together why the town does not want to dwell on the past, as traces of disturbing crimes emerge from the pristine landscape of snow and ice.



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.