Forty Days Without Shadow

Book excerpt: The international award-winning, bestselling phenomenon, now available in English for the first time. Tomorrow, the sun will rise for the first time in 40 days. Thirty minutes of daylight will herald the end of the polar night in Kautokeino, a small village in northern Norway, home to the indigenous Sami people. But in the last hours of darkness, a precious artifact is stolen: an ancient Sami drum. The most important piece in the museum's collection, it was due to go on tour with a UN exhibition in a few short weeks. Hours later, a man is murdered. Mattis, one of the last Sami reindeer herders, is found dead in his gumpy. Are the two crimes connected? In a town fraught with tension--between the indigenous Samis fighting to keep their culture alive, the ultra-Lutheran Scandinavian colonists concerned with propagating their own religion, and the greedy geologists eager to mine the region's ore deposits--it falls to two local police officers to solve the crimes. Klemet Nango, an experienced Sami officer, and Nina Nansen, his much younger partner from the south of Norway, must find the perpetrators before it's too late... THIS EDITION INCLUDES A READING GROUP GUIDE