Sand

By Eeva Meltio

COMICS FINLANDIA 2024 WINNER!

In a land starved of rain and hope, young Ollie must learn to bury her grief to harvest redemption.

Midwest plains, 1931. Drought has transformed the plains into a desert of sand. Farmers have abandoned the parched land and moved on to cultivate black gold on the endlessly expanding oil fields, or fled to the coast in hopes of a better life. Olive—or Ollie—finds herself working as an oil driller’s assistant on the oil fields. However, Ollie dreams of something entirely different: she has resolved to bring the rain back and, through that, find her way home. Ollie meets an old rainmaker and joins him to learn the secrets of making rain. Their journey across the plains leads her to confront painful memories while also discovering a part of herself.

Sand is a multi-layered story about grief and forgiveness, about a broken family’s struggle to find a way to deal with the past and an allegory of climate change. Ultimately, however, it is a book about hope.

The four-colour, 224-page graphic novel is one of the finalists in the Most Beautiful Books of Finland 2024 competition in the category of book covers.

Publishing information

Awards & nominations

About the author

Eeva Meltio (1977) is a graphic novelist and designer from Helsinki, Finland. Her recent work focuses on storytelling mainly through mediums of drawing, oil painting and animation. She invests a great deal of time on the research phase of the projects to fully understand and internalize the historical and social context of the themes she undertakes.Her recent graphic novel Sand is situated in the Midwest and takes place during the severe droughts of the 1930s. The devastating effects it had on the society and the environment are central themes of the story. In her debut graphic novel Animals (2015) she explores the relationship between humans and animals, using animals as mirrors to human behavior.