The haunting, multigenerational saga of a family of Sámi women fighting the devastation of their way of life. Elin Anna Lanna’s novel The Home of the Drowned, traces the story of a family- Ingá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Anne – from 1942 to 1982. At a nearby lake recently dammed to build a hydroelectric power station floods their village. Their home, a type of hut called a goahti, is being submerged by the water.

The Sámi are an indigenous people who historically inhabited northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and part of Russia. Due to state-sanctioned assimilation policies over the past several hundred years much of their way of life has been eroded. Every summer, Ingá, Rávdná, Anne travel west to their village on the lake. But this summer Ingá is thirteen, they arrive to find her home and possessions have disappeared under water, the land flooded by a dam built to supply hydropower to a society that has continually stolen from them. Defying the authorities, Rávdná decides a build a proper house on the lake to replace what was lost, becoming an unlikely activist even as her actions isolate her family from the rest of the community. Meanwhile, Anne’s health is in decline, and a concerned Ingá merely longs to live like everyone else- an impossible wish when the Swedish state is relentlessly drowning her world.

Drawing on her own family’s history of forced relocation and violent colonial dispossession, Elin Anna Labba’s debut novel brings Sámi history to the fore through this intimate story. In poetic prose deftly translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, she reveals connections between land, water, and people that hauntingly reverberate with the question: what is that makes a home?

Nothing is true, and everything is true, poetry will never hurt more than what has happened. 

The Home of the Drowned by Elin Anna Labba, translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, Harvill £16.99/University of Minnesota Press. $28.95, 304pages.