👀 First impressions:
that is exactly the kind of reader Elin Anna Labba wrote this book for. Labba is a Sámi writer and journalist from the arctic region of Sweden, already celebrated for her nonfiction debut, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow, which won Sweden’s prestigious August Prize for Best Nonfiction. With The Home of the Drowned, she turns to fiction for the first time, drawing on her own family’s history of forced relocation to tell the story of three women whose summer settlement is swallowed by rising waters after a hydroelectric dam is built on their land.
The novel follows Iŋgá, her fierce mother Rávdná, and her ailing Aunt Ánne across four decades, from 1942 to 1982, as they navigate loss, displacement, and the slow erosion of everything that once made their world feel stable. When I first read the premise, I expected something quietly devastating, and on that front, the book delivers completely. But what I was not prepared for was how intimate and textured the storytelling would be. This is not a sweeping political novel that keeps you at arm’s length. It pulls you right into the smoke-filled goahti, right to the edge of the rising lake, and asks you to sit with these women as their world changes around them.
✅ What I Liked:
The writing in this book is extraordinary. Labba has an almost sensory approach to prose. You can feel the cold, smell the damp wool, hear the water lapping against places it was never supposed to reach. The translation by Elizabeth Clark Wessel deserves huge credit here because the language feels effortless and deeply poetic without ever tipping into something overwrought. It reads like a novel written in water, to borrow a phrase from Swedish critics, and that description is remarkably fitting.
What impressed me most was how Labba builds her characters. Rávdná is a powerhouse of quiet, stubborn resistance. She refuses to accept the loss of her home and takes it upon herself to build a proper wooden house on higher ground, even when the authorities deny her a housing loan on the basis of her so-called racial characteristics and nomadic lifestyle. Her defiance is not loud or dramatic. It is steady and bone-deep, and it made her one of the most compelling characters I have read in a long time. The tension between Rávdná and her daughter Iŋgá is equally well drawn. Iŋgá is a teenager who just wants a normal life, and her frustration with her mother’s activism feels painfully real. That generational push and pull between holding on to your roots and wanting to belong somewhere less painful gives the novel so much emotional weight.
Aunt Ánne, meanwhile, carries the grief of the story almost silently. Her declining health mirrors the decline of the community itself, and Labba handles her arc with such tenderness that it left me genuinely moved. There are cultural details woven throughout the novel, from reindeer herding traditions to deeply held superstitions about death and photography, that make the world feel richly alive even as it is being dismantled.
The way Labba uses water as both a literal and symbolic force is masterful. The lake that once sustained the community becomes the thing that destroys it, and that transformation haunts every page. The drowned trees tangling fishing nets, the decomposing plant matter changing the biology of the water, the father’s grave slowly disappearing beneath the surface. These details accumulate into something that feels less like a novel and more like a remembrance.
❎ What I didn’t Like:
If I have one reservation, it is the pacing in the middle section of the book. The novel spans forty years, and while the early chapters set the scene with vivid urgency, the middle stretches can feel repetitive as the cycle of loss and rebuilding plays out again and again. I understand that this is partly the point. The relentlessness of displacement is exactly what Labba is trying to convey. But as a reading experience, there were moments where I felt the momentum dip, and I had to push through passages that covered similar emotional ground to what had come before.
I also found that some of the secondary characters in the wider village community could have been more developed. Rávdná, Iŋgá, and Ánne are drawn with such care and specificity, but a few of the neighbours and community members blur together. Given how much the novel is about a collective experience of dispossession, I would have liked to feel more connected to the broader community rather than encountering them mostly at the edges.
Finally, while the novel is beautifully restrained, there were a handful of moments where I wanted just a little more interiority from Iŋgá, especially in the later sections when she is an adult looking back on her childhood. Her perspective is often observational, and while that restraint suits the tone of the book, I occasionally wished for a deeper dive into her emotional processing of everything she witnessed.
📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you are drawn to literary historical fiction that centres Indigenous experiences, this is an essential read. Fans of authors like Ann-Helen Laestadius (Stolen) or Linda Hogan will find a kindred spirit in Labba’s writing. If you loved the quiet power of books like Burial Rites by Hannah Kent or the environmental and cultural themes in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, this sits in a similar emotional space.
This is also a book for anyone interested in Scandinavian history beyond the usual narratives. The story of hydroelectric expansion in northern Sweden and its devastating impact on Sámi communities is not widely known outside of the Nordic countries, and Labba brings it to life in a way that feels urgent and deeply personal rather than didactic. If you appreciate fiction that teaches you something about the world while breaking your heart a little, this belongs on your shelf.
It is also a wonderful choice for book clubs. The themes of home, identity, resistance, and the cost of so-called progress provide plenty to discuss, and the relatively compact length makes it accessible even for slower readers.
💭 Final Thoughts:
The Home of the Drowned is one of those novels that stays with you long after you close the final page. It is quietly devastating, beautifully written, and rooted in a history that more people need to know about. Labba manages to tell a deeply political story through the most personal of lenses, and the result is something that feels both intimate and epic. The relationship between Rávdná and Iŋgá alone would be worth the read, but layered on top of that is a profound meditation on what it means to lose your home, not to a single catastrophic event, but to a slow, deliberate drowning carried out in the name of progress.
The pacing wobbles slightly in the middle and a few secondary characters could have used more depth, but these are minor issues in a novel that otherwise does so much so well. Labba’s prose is stunning, her empathy for her characters is boundless, and the translation preserves every ounce of that beauty. This is a debut novel that reads like the work of someone who has been writing fiction for decades, and I cannot wait to see what she does next.
🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE
Final Rating ★★★★ – A slow, beautiful flood of grief, resilience, and home
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