Stolen

Nine-year-old Elsa, daughter of Sámi reindeer herders in northern Sweden, witnesses a man brutally kill her beloved reindeer calf and threaten her into silence. Ten years later, hatred against the Sámi keeps escalating, more reindeer are tortured and killed, and Elsa decides she has had enough. Stolen (originally Stöld) is Laestadius’s first adult novel, and it hit Swedish literature with the force of a story that had been waiting decades to be told.

Why Start Here

This is the book that made Laestadius a household name in Sweden and brought Sámi experience to a global readership. It won Sweden’s Book of the Year in 2021, was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, and became a Netflix film. The novel works as a coming-of-age story, a thriller, and a political reckoning all at once, making it accessible to readers with no prior knowledge of Sámi culture.

Starting here gives you Laestadius at her most urgent. The prose is direct and physical, the landscape is vivid, and the injustice at the story’s core will stay with you. Her second adult novel, Punished, moves into historical territory, exploring the trauma of Sámi boarding schools in the 1950s. Stolen provides the contemporary ground that makes that historical depth resonate.

What to Expect

A story that moves between Elsa’s childhood trauma and her young adult reckoning with it. The violence against the reindeer is never gratuitous but never softened either. Northern Sweden is rendered with precise, cold beauty, and the Sámi community’s resilience comes through in small, daily acts of resistance. The pacing builds steadily toward a confrontation that feels both inevitable and earned.