Aednan

An Epic

By: Linnea Axelsson, Saskia Vogel - translator

Narrated by: Angela Dawe

Length: 2 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • The winner of Sweden’s most prestigious literary award makes her American debut with an epic, multigenerational novel-in-verse about two Sámi families and their quest to stay together across a century of migration, violence, and colonial trauma.

“Crystalline prose that reads like poetry and myth at once. There are intricate layers of beauty and meaning here in sparse clusters across a vast new landscape as I’ve never read before. The music of this book is old, and it is new, and it is old.”—Tommy Orange, bestselling author of There, There and Wandering Stars

In Northern Sámi, the word Ædnan means the land, the earth, and my mother. These are all crucial forces within the lives of the Indigenous families that animate this groundbreaking book: an astonishing verse novel that chronicles a hundred years of change: a book that will one day stand alongside Halldór Laxness’s Independent People and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter as an essential Scandinavian epic.

The tale begins in the 1910s, as Ristin and her family migrate their herd of reindeer to summer grounds. Along the way, forced to separate due to the newly formed border between Sweden and Norway, Ristin loses one of her sons in the aftermath of an accident, a grief that will ripple across the rest of the book. In the wake of this tragedy, Ristin struggles to manage what’s left of her family and her community.

In the 1970s, Lise, as part of a new generation of Sámi grappling with questions of identity and inheritance, reflects on her traumatic childhood, when she was forced to leave her parents and was placed in a Nomad School to be stripped of the language of her ancestors. Finally, in the 2010s we meet Lise’s daughter, Sandra, an embodiment of Indigenous resilience, an activist fighting for reparations in a highly publicized land rights trial, in a time when the Sámi language is all but lost.

Weaving together the voices of half a dozen characters, from elders to young people unsure of their heritage, Axelsson has created a moving family saga around the consequences of colonial settlement. Ædnan is a powerful reminder of how durable language can be, even when it is borrowed, especially when it has to hold what no longer remains. “I was the weight / in the stone you brought / back from the coast // to place on / my grave,” one character says to another from beyond the grave. “And I flew above / the boat calling / to you all: // There will be rain / there will be rain.”

©2024 Linnea Axelsson (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

*One of LitHub's most-anticipated books of 2024! And a most-anticipated January book at The New York Times Book Review and in Kirkus Reviews.*

"A remarkable novel…'an epic'...is an ambitious subtitle, but Axelsson earns it. Generations unfold across the book’s often incantatory, alternating first-person sections...[Aednan is] full of sonorous power yet shot through with an undeniable intimacy... [and] it achieves a taut and at times uncanny lyricism in Saskia Vogel’s exquisite translation." —Kanishk Tharoor, The Washington Post

"Lyrical and ambitious... every page offers expanses of white space, reminding the reader that this is a narrative of absence, fracture, silence, erasure. This sparse form mirrors the landscape itself: harsh, thinly populated, often snowbound… Axelsson’s novel is a bold and original attempt to answer that question and to return the Sami to their rightful place in history.”—Alice Jolly, The Guardian

"An epic poem, much honored in Sweden since its publication in 2018, that charts the fortunes of a Sámi community against opposing nationalisms… A sharp-edged tale in verse of colonial suppression, resistance, and survival." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)