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The Home of the Drowned
  • Published: 21 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529975406
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $38.00

The Home of the Drowned

Formats & editions
Hardback
1 Sept 2026
EBook
21 May 2026
Audiobook
21 May 2026
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A powerful family saga set in the wilds of Sweden, where the summer settlement of the reindeer-herding Sámi people is flooded without warning, and three women must fight for their heritage and future in a changing world.

The sides of the mountain were shining almost red under the night sun, while rivers flowed white as milk down their slopes. People kept wading back and forth. They’d all moved west just like always, and it had taken some time to reach the village. Not many days, but long enough to arrive too late. The dam was finished. They’d known it. But no one realized how quickly the lake would fill up.

Spring 1942, the time of the golden midnight sun. When Ingá, her mother Ravdná and aunt Ánne return to the summer settlement, they are hor­rified to discover that their village has been drowned, leaving the shore, their goahtis huts and the beautiful birch forest submerged beneath a strange underwater landscape. Without any notice to the community, the Company has dammed the lake for hydropower. Modern society is creeping closer with its demand for electricity and comfort, and with little consideration for its impact on the natural world or on those who have inhabited it for centuries. The villagers have great respect for the lake; they have learned that you can be on the water, but not in the water; most of them cannot even swim.

The Home of the Drowned is the story of a small family of nomadic women: a rebellious mother who finds herself fighting a lonely battle, a tender sister who mourns the loss of a child, and a pragmatic daughter who wishes to put the past behind her in order to live a life just like everyone else.
  • Published: 21 May 2026
  • ISBN: 9781529975406
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $38.00

About the author

Elin Anna Labba

ELIN ANNA LABBA is a Sámi journalist and former editor in chief of the magazine Nuorat. She works for the Sámi Authors’ Centre with a mission to strengthen and emphasize Sámi literature. Her first book, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi, received the 2020 August Prize in Sweden for Best Nonfiction.
EAL

Praise for The Home of the Drowned

Sang in a dirty realism that smells of smoke, whitefish… As if written in water

Sveriges Television

A sinuous, stunning novel – a lamentation that is also rich in razor-sharp, sensual details

Expressen

Mesmerising… beautiful in a way that is also painful

Göteborgs-Posten

A magnificent debut

Upsala Nya Tidning

The Home of the Drowned shines a light on Swedish colonial history. I felt this story bodily, as its three central women moved me between their resistance and adaptation - their anger and resignation - to land, finally, in a feeling of defencelessness. Elin Anna Labba's prose is like the rising waters of a dammed lake, slowly finding its way into every corner of my being. It is heart-achingly beautiful. The author is a master at conveying the importance of the individual in the fabric of the wider world. I can't recommend it enough

Lisa Ridzén, author of WHEN THE CRANES FLY SOUTH

With astonishing descriptive deftness, Elin Anna Labba leads us to walk with her into an un-drowned past, and a European history which will to many of us be shockingly new. In this story of the struggle of a family of Sámi women, and the brutalisation of indigenous people by the machine of so-called progress, the great saga of humanity seems mystically encoded. We are shown what has been lost, what can still be saved, and the depth of inner strength that is mustered to strive against power when it can no longer see its own soul. With the heft of myth and the urgency of activism, this book is a clear-eyed portal into a world of wonder, injustice, resilience, and hope, studded with the living language of a culture that has suffered much and refused to drown

Damian Le Bas, author of THE DROWNED PLACES