Book review: Wolf Winter, by Cecilia Ekback

Wolf Winter is a mesmerising debut novel  by Swedish-born, American-based author Cecilia Ekback. Ekback was born in the far north of Sweden, which is where she sets Wolf Winter, on the bleak and isolated Blackasen Mountain.

It's 1717 and Maija and, Paavo with their two young daughters, Frederika and Dorotea, have arrived on the mountain to start a new life. There are only six homesteads and all of the settlers have "come here fleeing someone or something and ... avoid talking of the past".

It is a day's journey to an empty town, which is occupied only twice a year when the settlers arrive to celebrate Christmas and Lady Day. The church dominates and regulates the scattered community, witches are still tried and, despite their recent conversion to Christianity, the local Lapp herders are both feared and distrusted.

While taking their goats to pasture, Frederika discovers Eriksson, a fellow settler, dead, "his stomach torn open, his insides on the grass violently and stringy". The settlers blame wolves. Maija, however, is not convinced, asking, "What wild animal cuts a body so clean?" It's not the first time there's been trouble on the mountain, children have been lost and "a whole family disappeared overnight".

Life is hard and, as winter approaches, Paavo decides to travel to the coast to find work, leaving his wife and children to survive the winter, a winter the Lapps predict will be a "wolf winter ... the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal ... Mortal and alone".

Convinced that one of the settlers murdered Eriksson, Maija continues to ask questions, incurring the anger of both the settlers and the church, as she begins to uncover secrets long buried. Meanwhile, Frederika, who has inherited her great-grandmother's "gifts", communes with the spirits of the mountain, putting her mortal soul in danger.

Wolf Winter is richly atmospheric and vivid. The cold is beyond imagining, as is the enveloping dark and the terrible hunger as stores diminish. Inevitably, Wolf Winter will be compared with Hannah Kent's remarkable Burial Rites. Ekback, however, has achieved something different. Wolf Winter is an historical crime mystery in the Nordic noir tradition, which chills as it impresses.