The Guardian lists Petra Rautiainen’s Land of Snow and Ashes as Best recent translated fiction
2 February 2022
The Guardian lists Petra Rautiainen’s Land of Snow and Ashes as Best recent translated fiction
Petra Rautiainen’s debut novel Land of Snow and Ashes (Tuhkaan piirretty maa) is at last available laso in English in the United Kingdom. The English edition is published by Pushkin Press and has been translated by David Hackston. Just before its publication, The Guardian has referred to the work as ‘a wartime epic’ and listed Land of Snow and Ashes among the ’best recent translated fiction’:
“In 1944 Finland reversed its second world war allegiance to the Nazis following a treaty with Russia. This debut novel is set in part during that shaky period, narrated by a soldier working in a Nazi camp in the northern town of Inari, “at the edge of the earth”. His diary alternates with the story of photographer Inkeri after the war, ostensibly reporting on the loss of the local Sámi culture, but really looking for her husband who went missing in the war. In the 1944 sections, we find out what happened to him. Rautiainen’s prose is occasionally clunky as it makes points about cultural domination (“Photography was about power – a form of manipulation”), but the book reveals so much more about a war we thought we knew that it feels like a potted epic.”
Read the full article by John Self here.
Since the release of the novel in 2020 it has been aquired in 10 countries and is translated to Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian and Swedish. A pre-view of the French edition of Land of Snow and Ashes was published last week in the French literary magazine, Actualitté. Read the pre-view of Un pays de neige et de cendres here. Sébastian Cagnoli is the translator of the work.
The Danish edition Land af Sne of Aske published by Modtryk and translated by Birgita Bonde Hansen was a finalist for Bog & Idé’s book cover of the month.
