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review

Ekback’s Wolf Winter, set in 1717 Sweden, is filled with historical details, atmosphere and suspense.

It is 1717, in the far north of Sweden. A woman named Maija, her husband and two daughters arrive from Finland, having traded their fishing boat for an uncle's homestead on Blackasen Mountain in Lapland. They arrive unsure of what to expect, and find a small group of settlers who eke out a meagre living from the harsh land. There is a strange feel about the place.

It only grows stranger.

Maija's daughters are herding goats when they discover the mutilated body of a neighbour, Eriksson. The locals are quick to blame wolves, but Maija isn't so sure. After examining the body, she becomes convinced that Eriksson was killed with a sharp weapon at close range. There are few signs of a struggle, leading Maija to believe it was most likely someone the victim knew. Convinced that an unsolved murder will destroy the community, Maija sets out to find who killed Eriksson.

She works with the local priest, who is under pressure from his bishop to hold someone accountable for the murder. At the same time, Maija's daughter, Frederika, starts to see dark shapes in the woods. Are they real or is the harsh winter affecting her mind? Maija, the priest and Frederika take turns narrating the story as they try to uncover the truth.

Wolf Winter is full of atmosphere – a dark, cold book that is all numbed feelings and suspense. Emptiness is described, for example, as what you feel "when summer is over." The trees have "jagged black spears" and a spidery mould hangs between the twigs. When the sun does comes out, the flies start to buzz.

Although its author, Cecilia Ekback, now calls Calgary home, she grew up in Sweden and visited her grandparents in Lapland, an experience that comes through in the writing. English is the author's second language and, read out loud, the prose feels somewhat stilted and formal on the tongue. It did remind me of a Swede speaking English. But given the foreign setting, it suits the story.

The novel captures the feel of a frigid land, the rough wool of Maija's mittens as they freeze on her skin, the howling of the wind and the sting of snow blowing on your face. To get a sense of the book's mood, take the dark outlook of Stieg Larsson and mash it together with Margaret Atwood's idea in Survival – that our battle against the wild is central to Canadians' literary identity. The cold and the darkness and survival – could Wolf Winter be written by anyone other than a Canadian-based Swede?

The title comes from a Swedish expression: A "wolf winter" is one that is long and bitterly cold, "the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal … mortal and alone," and Ekback excels at describing the hardships of the settlers' lives. The characters, especially Maija, are sharply drawn and steeped in the kind of Scandinavian stoicism one needs to make it through a brutal winter.

It's in the historical details where the story comes alive. Ekback's description of using pine boughs as impromptu snowshoes, for example, or the panic of shovelling during a blizzard to keep the snow away so that the door can still be opened, both feel urgent and real. During the time the novel is set, Sweden was a struggling superpower. Fighting wars on many fronts, it was running out of money and many people had died. The priest is in the ruling structure of the church and transfers the pressure onto the community, which is how Ekback shows how the politics of the time influenced day-to-day life. All these things combine to provide Wolf Winter with a powerfully dark depth.

While Wolf Winter is fuelled by historical details, atmosphere and suspense, its pace comes from its central mystery: Who killed Eriksson? Maija risks everything to find the answer even as the long winter threatens her family's survival. In the last section, a series of unconvincing confessions disrupts the momentum the author has built up, resulting in an ending that is less than the many good parts that came before it. Wolf Winter is also a novel that mixes genres, something that can be fascinating to read but, for an author, hard to balance; as the novel builds to its conclusion, the conventions of mystery begin to overtake the other elements, and the novel seems to buckle under the weight of explaining "who done it."

For the most part, Wolf Winter is an absorbing and impressive debut from an author who I look forward to reading again. It's enough of a page-turner to take to the beach, but it will be best read with a flashlight under a blanket while you are waiting out a winter storm.

Claire Cameron is the author of The Bear.

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