Wolf Winter by Cecila Ekbäck

Rather than being a translation, Cecilia Ekbäck’s debut was written in English straight off, but the rhythm can feel as if someone has Tippexed out the Swedish and typed her second language straight over the top.

This hybrid character is typical of the book as a whole, part murder mystery and part gothic novel set in the snowy wilderness of northern Sweden in the early 1700s. In the shadow of a foreboding mountain, bodies with strange markings start turning up and a settler woman, Maija, confronts the dark forces within her own remote community to try and get to the bottom of what has happened. Superstition and magic clash with a more everyday danger as winter sets in on the slopes of Blackåsen.

As an introduction to early-18th-century sub-arctic Sweden the book paints an accurate picture, including the domination of the church and the harsh conditions in which the majority of people live. In the background lurk the Sami, always referred to with the outdated and questionable term ‘Lapps,’ with their traditions and customs unfamiliar to the incomers from the south. Whether a book set in such an atypical time and place can carry itself and the interest of the reader is another matter. Some of the descriptions of the winter landscape are perfect in this promising debut, but the book overall is undone by a language that frequently lapses into clunky Swedo-English when attempting to be literary. [Dominic Hinde]