Stolen by Ann-Helen Laestadius

 You really need to be sitting somewhere warm when you read this as it is set in Scandinavia, just north of the Arctic Circle, and the cold seems to creep from the pages all through your body.

Elsa is a member of the Sami community who are Indigenous people making a living by herding reindeer.  At the start of the book she is only nine years old, and alone when she witnesses a local man poaching reindeer, and she sees him standing over the dead body of a calf she had been given to raise herself.  The man threatens to harm her if she says anything to anyone, and from then on she spends her days looking over her shoulder and living in fear of meeting him again.

The book came about because the author wanted to capture the challenges that face the Sami in their everyday life, and how difficult it is to maintain their traditional methods of herding and to keep their culture alive.  As with Indigenous populations the world over, the Sami have become something of a tourist attraction with their beautiful clothing and inherited skills, and it is getting harder and harder to have their issues taken seriously.

The book takes the form of a thriller as the story follows Elsa through her teenage years, and tells how the continuing presence of the poacher impacts on not only her life, but that of her family.  The community frequently seek help from the police, but reindeer poaching is simply treated as theft and the police can never be persuaded to take it seriously enough.  Many animals are lost to poaching as those responsible are confident they will get away with it, but it keeps the herders constantly on high alert and generates a great deal of stress.

There is a lot to be learnt from this book, but it is not heavy handed with its teaching, and it remains a very readable thriller.  There is a stark bleakness to the writing which, coupled with all the descriptions of the cold, makes it rather harsh to start with but after a while that becomes the norm.  A sticker on the front cover says that it is soon to be a major Netflix film, and it's already a Number One best seller, so there is a lot going for it.