Ann-Helén Laestadius

Teenage mental health issues are treated intelligently and sensitively in this bittersweet
young adult novel, set in Kiruna, Sweden’s northernmost mining town.
Translated by Annie Prime

In Ann-Helén Laestadius' Stolen, a nine-year-old Sámi girl in Arctic Sweden witnesses a hate crime. The trauma will remain with her into young adulthood, when she will battle for the rights of her people – and herself as a future reindeer herder.

Punishment depicts life in a harsh 1950s boarding school for the children of Sámi reindeer herders, and how those children grapple with their trauma thirty years on.