Author(s): Cecilia Ekbäck

Staff Picks- Read our reviews

'Like a silent fall of snow; suddenly, the reader is enveloped...visually acute, skilfully written; it won't easily erase its tracks in the reader's mind.' HILARY MANTEL, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies There are six homesteads on Blackasen Mountain. A day's journey away lies the empty town. It comes to life just once, in winter, when the Church summons her people through the snows. Then, even the oldest enemies will gather. But now it is summer, and new settlers are come. It is their two young daughters who find the dead man, not half an hour's walk from their cottage. The father is away. And whether stubborn, or stupid, or scared for her girls, the mother will not let it rest. To the wife who is not concerned when her husband does not come home for three days; to the man who laughs when he hears his brother is dead; to the priest who doesn't care; she asks and asks her questions, digging at the secrets of the mountain. They say a wolf made those wounds. But what wild animal cuts a body so clean?

~ This book is so compelling, and makes our winter look like summer in comparison to the Swedish Lapland of 1717. The reader is confronted at the beginning of the book with an eerie and disturbing scene - two young sisters exploring their new home of Blackasen mountain who happen upon a glade in which a dead man lies with his stomach gashed open, rotting in the summer heat. 

Their new neighbours help to remove the body and his family is informed, but whilst the settlers on Blackasen claim a wolf or bear did it, Maija (the girls' mother) is convinced otherwise, and can not let it go - as something more sinister seems to be at play. Federika, her 14 year old daughter, begins to see visions of the dead man himself, and becomes equally compelled, in secret, to discover the cause of Eriksson's death. As Winter closes in on them with a force not seen in recent history, the native Lapps come with it and the settlers' secrets begin to emerge alongside tragic events as Maija's family struggles to survive the winter and discover what is really going on in this hostile land.
Skilfully written and very hard to put down! Jemma