Stolen

Set in a small village north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden, the novel follows Elsa, the daughter of Sámi reindeer herders, from age 9 to 19 as she confronts the systematic killing of her family's reindeer, police indifference, and pervasive anti-Sámi hatred. The Sámi are the Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, for whom reindeer hold deep spiritual and cultural significance.

Part I opens in winter 2008. Nine-year-old Elsa skis alone to her family's reindeer corral and finds Robert Isaksson from the neighboring village holding a bloody knife with a piece of reindeer ear between his lips. Her own calf, Nástegallu, lies dead outside the fence, its earmarks, the unique cuts that identify a reindeer's owner, sliced away. Robert drags a finger across his throat before departing. As he leaves, a fragment of the ear falls from his pocket. Elsa retrieves it and sits beside her dead calf until her parents, Nils Johan and Marika, find her unable to speak.

Elsa hides the ear fragment and refuses to identify Robert, terrified he will kill her family. Her older brother Mattias, 16 and impulsive, presses her to confirm what she saw, but she stays silent. At the police station, Officer Martin Henriksson interviews her, and she lies, saying she saw no one. The police classify the killing as theft rather than animal cruelty, and the investigation is quickly closed.

Elsa's grandmother Áhkku and grandfather Áddjá live next door. Marika, who married into the Sámi community, is sometimes called rivgu, a term for a non-Sámi woman, despite speaking the language and sewing traditional gákti, the distinctive Sámi clothing. Police documents in the kitchen drawer detail previous attacks on the family's reindeer, all with investigations closed. At school, Elsa sits alone, watched by a relative of Robert's who seems to know what she witnessed.

Anna-Stina, Elsa's cousin and closest friend, describes Robert's other atrocities, including cutting a uterus from a living cow. Anna-Stina's uncle Lars-Erik, known as Lasse, becomes a bright presence in Elsa's life. He feeds the reindeer alongside her, tows her behind his snowmobile on skis, and tells her she matters. He is the only adult who seems to sense the weight she carries.

Lasse takes a job at a mine and dies by suicide. His sister Hanna, Anna-Stina's mother, receives the call. At the funeral, nine-year-old Elsa finds the pastor and asks whether Lasse can go to heaven and whether liars go to hell; the pastor reassures her. The family closes ranks, refusing outside counseling because no psychologists speak Sámi.

Part II jumps 10 years to 2018. Elsa, now 19, has returned to work full-time with the reindeer. Áddjá has died. Áhkku has dementia. Mattias, 26, lives next door but isolates himself behind drawn blinds. Robert has partnered with Petri Stålnacke, a former coworker. The two men chase reindeer on snowmobiles, break their legs, film the suffering, and sell the butchered meat to restaurants.

Elsa discovers bags of butchering waste near a stream. When the police refuse to come, she loads the evidence onto a trailer and drives it to the locked station, photographs it, and contacts journalist Lovisa Wikberg. The article names Elsa and her collective, the reindeer-herding group to which her family belongs. Death threats and nighttime intimidation follow.

The family moves Áhkku to a nursing home. Confused and reliving her childhood at the state-run nomad school, where Sámi children were historically forced to attend, Áhkku believes she is being sent away again and presses her palms to the window as Elsa leaves.

Elsa follows a blood trail from a shot pregnant reindeer to Robert's barn. Police arrive for the first time, but Robert denies everything and the officers are called away before obtaining a search warrant. Mattias breaks down. Elsa finds him drunk in the root cellar, calling her unna oabba, little sister, for the first time in years, raging that predators and poachers are destroying them while the police never act.

Threatening texts arrive on Elsa's phone. Petri dies alone while loading a stolen reindeer. Elsa confronts Henriksson, noting that nearly 100 reports from their collective have produced zero convictions. Robert, drunk after Petri's funeral, attacks Elsa's home at night, shattering the kitchen window and shouting slurs. The police find no corroborating witnesses, and the investigation stalls. At the Jokkmokk Winter Market, someone drapes a dead reindeer over the town's road sign, its blood smeared over the Sámi place name.

Part III opens in 2019. Nils Johan has built a fence around the house. At school, where Elsa substitute teaches, Jon-Isak, Hanna's nine-year-old son born shortly after Lasse's death, blames Elsa's media appearances for worsening his bullying. During calf marking, Áhkku visits, briefly lucid, and warns Elsa not to reveal everything she knows, alluding to her rumored abilities as a gunsttar, a traditional Sámi healer.

Mattias secretly plans to die by suicide. He packs his grandfather's old waders, which lack a belt and would fill with water in the rapids, and rides to the river. Simultaneously, Elsa discovers Robert trapped under his overturned four-wheeler in the forest. She raises her rifle and presses the barrel to his head. She feels Lasse's presence urging her not to shoot, fires a single shot into the sky, grabs Robert's phone, and runs.

Robert's dog, frightened by the gunshot, bolts to the river where Mattias sits. Mattias throws the dog across the water onto a small island. Robert arrives, sees the dog, and pulls on the waders despite Mattias's warning. He slips, and the waders fill with water, flipping him upside down. Mattias hurls himself into the current but cannot reach Robert, who drowns along with the dog.

Elsa and Mattias carry their secrets in isolation. Anna-Stina experiences a bleed during pregnancy; Hanna calls Elsa, believed to have the power to stanch blood, but Elsa does not answer. The baby survives, and the scare jolts Hanna into embracing her role as grandmother. Police eventually recover Robert's body downstream and discover Áddjá's initials inside the waders.

Elsa confronts Mattias and learns he planned to drown himself in the waders. She confesses she fired the shot and took Robert's phone; he confesses he threw the dog onto the island. He reveals that Lasse used to say Elsa was stronger than all of them. Elsa insists Mattias seek help at SANKS, the Sámi Norwegian National Advisory Unit on Mental Health and Substance Abuse, in Karasjok, Norway. Both siblings tell the police. Officer Ljungblad closes the case, ruling the drowning accidental. Police uncover reindeer carcasses, a bear's head, and records of a poaching network in Robert's home. Henriksson claims credit publicly, outraging the family.

In the final scene, Elsa follows Jon-Isak's ski tracks to the old corral, where the boy has been singing Lasse's joik, a traditional Sámi vocal art, for the uncle he never met. Elsa climbs the fence beside him and shows him Nástegallu's ear, telling him the story she kept secret for a decade. She chooses Jon-Isak because Lasse, who sensed the burden Elsa carried as a child, lives on in the boy. Jon-Isak drops the ear in the snow. Elsa watches from behind a tree as the boy returns, retrieves the ear, buttons it into his coat pocket, looks up at the sky, and waves.