The Home of the Drowned

The haunting, multigenerational saga of a family of Sámi women fighting the devastation of their way of life

Nothing is true, and everything is true; poetry will never hurt more than what has happened. Every summer, Iŋgá, her mother Rávdná, and her Aunt Ánne travel west to their village on the lake. But the summer Iŋgá 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 proper house on the lake to replace what was lost, becoming an unlikely activist even as her actions isolate her family from the rest of the community. Meanwhile, Ánne's health is in decline, and a concerned Iŋgá 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 through this intimate story. In poetic prose deftly translated by Elizabeth Clark Wessel, she reveals connections between land, water, and people that hauntingly reverberate with the question: what is it that makes a home?

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Elin Anna Labba is a Sámi writer and journalist from the arctic region of Sweden. She has worked as an editor for Sámi magazines and as director of Tjállegoahte, the Sámi Writers' Centre, which is dedicated to promoting Sámi literature. Her first book, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: The Forced Displacement of the Northern Sámi, also published in translation by the University of Minnesota Press, was awarded Sweden's 2020 August Prize for Best Nonfiction along with several other prestigious awards. In 2024, Labba was appointed Honorary Doctor of Philosophy at Luleå University of Technology in recognition of her contribution to both literary and public discourse and for giving voice to communities shaped by historical and environmental change. The Swedish publication of The Home of the Drowned was awarded the Norrland Literature Prize in 2025.

Elizabeth Clark Wessel is a poet and translator of numerous books, including The Eighth House by Linda Segtnan, Let's Hope for the Best by Carolina Setterwall, and What We Owe by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde. Originally from rural Nebraska, she now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.