The Home of the Drowned - Elin Anna Labba, Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Translator)

Category: Historical Fiction
Language: English
Keywords: Colonialism Indigenous Scandinavian Literature Sweden Swedish Literature

Written by Elin Anna Labba, Elizabeth Clark Wessel (Translator)
Read by Kaisa Hammarlund
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

Brought to you by Penguin.

The powerful, haunting saga of a family of Sámi women fighting for their way of life in a changing world, when their summer settlement is flooded without warning

Every summer, Ingá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Ánne travel west to their village on the lake. But the summer Ingá is thirteen, they arrive to find their 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.

The Home of the Drowned follows these women’s fortunes over forty years – from 1942 to 1982 – as the water their people have lived near for centuries is transformed into a menacing force that threatens all they hold dear. Defying the authorities, Rávdná decides to build a house on the lake to replace what was lost, becoming an unlikely activist. Meanwhile, Ánne’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. The Home of the Drowned reveals connections between land, water and people that hauntingly reverberate with the question: what is it that makes a home?

‘Heartachingly beautiful’ Lisa Ridzén, author of WHEN THE CRANES FLY SOUTH

Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
Release date: 05-21-26