
Pushkin Press
Linnea Axelsson |Ædnan
9781805331339
30/01/25
PB
432 pages
Translated by Saskia Vogel
Crystalline… reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I’ve never read before. The music of this book is old, and it is new, and it is old
Tommy Orange, author of ‘There, There’
Vividly captures the plight of the Sámi people… Lyrical and ambitious… Ædnan contains echoes of epic poems and Norse sagas but also feels contemporary and accessible… bold and original
Guardian
Remarkable… Like the best epics, Aednan is a story not just of a people but also of people, full of sonorous power yet shot through with an undeniable intimacy… Extraordinary
Washington Post
In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the ground, the earth. In this majestic verse novel, Linnea Axelsson chronicles the fates of two Indigenous Sámi families, telling of their struggle and persistence over a century of colonial displacement, loss and resistance.
It begins with Ristin and Ber-Joná, who are trying to care for their troubled young sons while migrating their reindeer herd in northernmost Scandinavia during the 1910s. The coming of the Swedes brings new borders that lay waste to Sámi customs and migration paths – and mean devastating separation for this family.
In the 1970s, Lise grapples with how she was forced to adapt to Swedish society, haunted by her time in a ‘nomad school’ where she was deprived of her ancestors’ language and history. Lise’s daughter, Sandra, seeks to reclaim that heritage, becoming an activist struggling for reparations from the Swedish state.
As one generation succeeds another, their voices interweave and form a spellbinding hymn to lands and traditions lost and reclaimed. Written in sparse, glittering verse that flows like a current,?Ædnan is a profound and moving epic of Sámi life.