Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Northern blights
JOHN GREEN is fascinated to read a crime thriller written from the point of view of Europe’s northern indigenous people
books
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
Stolen
By Ann-Helen Laestadius
Bloomsbury Circus, £18.99
THE SAMI people inhabit the region of Sapmi, encompassing northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola peninsula. The region was formerly known as Lapland, and the Sami known in English as Lapps or Laplanders, but these terms are, today, deemed offensive.
This novel tells the story of a girl growing up in a Sami family and the story is told largely by her. Elsa lives in the north of Sweden and is a nine-year-old Sami girl when the narrative begins, maturing into an adult by the end.
Like many of the families here, herding reindeer is the family’s chief means of livelihood, but a malevolent Swedish poacher who lives in the vicinity sees the wild-roaming herds as a source of cheap income for himself. The unfolding conflict between him and the family is at the centre of what becomes a tension-filled crime story even if the only murder victims are the reindeer.
Like so many minority peoples, the Sami find their culture and traditional ways of life challenged and under pressure from modernity, discrimination, and racist attitudes.
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JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
Odysseus’s homecoming myth is treated as a factual story, with strong resonances for our contemporary world. This is an implicit anti-war film that has an urgent relevance, writes JOHN GREEN
JOHN GREEN recommends an entertaining, if harsh and instructive, study of bullying, discipline and power dynamics in schools and at work
