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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