GLENN BURGESS suggests that, despite his record in Spain, Orwell’s enduring commitment to socialist revolution underpins his late novels
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Northern blights
JOHN GREEN is fascinated to read a crime thriller written from the point of view of Europe’s northern indigenous people
Sami Reindeer herding, Sweden
[Mats Andersson] 
CHRISTOPHER POLLARD explains how and why neoliberalism adopted the racist agenda common to the populist right of today
SYLVIA HIKINS recommends a sweeping survey of the world's biggest desert and the people who live there
GUILLERMO THOMAS is persuaded by a scathing critique of the Church of England and its embeddedness in imperialism
MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Materialists, Unmoored, Together, and Bambi: A Tale of Life in The Woods
TONY BURKE revels in the publication of previously unreleased tracks by the great US folksinger
GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience
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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