Persecution

By Jenni Räinä

What is a person willing to do in order to survive?
 
Northern Ostrobothnia, 1715. Valpuri, a young woman from the small town of Ii, and her two brothers flee from the Russian troops of Peter the Great, who leave behind smoking villages and mutilated bodies. Valpuri’s only refuge are the hyperborean forests and waterways that offer solace and refuge, and the hope that her brothers will survive.

Meanwhile, a teenage boy returns to the region with the Cossacks on a mission to uncover their hiding place and destroy them all. Valpuri realises that the boy is all too familiar to her - the son of the now-expelled rural police chief of Ii, Gustaf Lillbäck - whose three sons had been kidnapped by the Russians.

A masterly novel that grips the reader in its hold, Persecution transports the reader to the darkest moments of the Great Wrath, a time when nature was still untouched, but human lives were cheaper than ever. An unforgettably powerful novel about escape and survival in the midst of destruction that gets under the reader’s skin and stays with you long after the last page.
 
HISTORICAL NOTE
 
In 1715, during the period known as The Great Wrath, Peter the Great commanded that northern Finland be reduced to scorched earth in the final years of The Great Northern War. The sparsely populated region was raped and pillaged with six thousand civilians murdered and thousands of children kidnapped and taken to Russia. Those who remained were tortured or forced to flee to the safety of the surrounding mires and forests. Little of it was documented as the Swedish correspondents of the Crown had fled across the border to Sweden.
 
READING MATERIAL
Author letter
Finnish edition & PDF
Sample translation 80 pp.
Synopsis

Publishing information

About the author

Jenni Räinä (b. 1980) is a non-fiction writer and journalist. Räinä’s family roots are in the small hamlet of Hyry (pop. 200) just north of Oulu, where she currently lives.In the 2023 Botnia Prize nominee Marsh Memories (Suo muistaa) she embeds the themes of climate crisis and protection of the environment into the stories of fictional characters, Juho and Hellä. Her previous book Women Wandering the Wild (Kulkijat, 2021) is a break away from the traditional wilderness books and presents the stories of nine women who talk about the wild and their relationship with nature in an era of eco-crisis. The book also features Teija Soini’s photographs.Jenni Räinä is also one of the four authors of The Forest After Us (Metsä meidän jälkemme), which won the Finlandia Non-Fiction Prize in 2019. All of Jenni Räinä’s work deals with Finnish nature, especially forests and swamps, and reflects the author’s deep knowledge of these topics.In 2018, she was a nominee for the Finlandia Non-Fiction Award and for Bonnier’s Finnish Grand Prize for Journalism in the Book of the Year category. That same year, she was awarded the Botnia Literature Prize.