Cecilia Ekback - guest post

Last week I had the delight of reading and reviewing Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback - a murder mystery set in eighteenth century Swedish Lapland. Today I'm delighted to welcome Cecilia to talk about the inspiration, setting and meaning of Wolf Winter.....



The expression ‘wolf winter’ in Swedish (vargavinter) refers to an unusually bitter and long winter, but it is also used to describe the darkest of times in a human being’s life – the kind of period that imprints on you that you are mortal and, at the end of the day, always alone.  The old Nordic religions talked about fimbulvetr, ‘the ’large winter,’ that preceded the destruction of the world. It took place when Fenrisulven, the ‘wolf of the wolves’, had eaten the sun…

My father was my best friend. The period preceding and just after his death was my wolf winter. As he lay dying, I interviewed him about his life. He died and I continued speaking, with my grandmother, her sister, their friends, my mother... WOLF WINTER came out of those conversations. Thus the book was not as much an idea I had carried around with me for a long time, as a reaction, or a riposte, to a life event. I became very interested in ‘place’ – setting – in the largest sense of the word and the impact it had on people, versus ‘heritage’ – how many things do we not chose, but that are just there, in us, inherited from generations and generations.

Blackåsen Mountain does not exist as a physical place, but its nature is something I remember from my childhood: a combination of the places and memories I have from Hudiksvall, where I grew up, Knaften and Vormsele, the two small villages in Lapland where my grandparents lived, and Sånfjället, a mountain close to the Norwegian border, where our family had a cabin. Blackåsen is the embodiment of what I felt like growing up in the north of Sweden. It represents the fear, the doubts, the religious fervour, the loneliness and the need to fit in and to belong.

I began writing with the idea of several characters passing through their wolf winters at the same time. I wanted 'place' - the mountain - to be a character in its own right. Blackåsen Mountain watches the settlers. It doesn't care. It is dispassionate. It has already seen many of them come and go and it will see many more come and go after them. I brought this ‘place’ down onto the characters and let it impact them to the fullest. The characters and the plot grew out of the idea and the setting.

Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback

review by Maryom

Blackasen Mountain is a remote virtually uninhabited area of Swedish Lapland. Summers are brief and winters harsh. In 1717 a new family of settlers arrive in this inhospitable place; Paavo, who wants to put as much land between him and the sea as possible, his wife Maija and their two daughters, Frederika and Dorotea. Wolves and bears roam the land, and when Frederika discovers the dead body of one of their neighbours, wild animals are easily blamed. Maija isn't convinced though - to her, the slashes on the body look more like the work of a sword or rapier than a clawed foot. Enlisting the help of the priest, another comparative newcomer, Maija refuses to let the matter go ....but in a place where people can go for days without seeing their neighbours secrets are easily hidden and hard to expose.

Wolf Winter takes the whodunnit murder mystery and transports it to a time and place far removed from the modern urban landscape. In the early eighteenth century the far north of Sweden is remote and empty; a place where life itself is a struggle against the vagaries of the weather and the loss of a harvest can mean starvation. In the long, hard, dark winter, wolves howl at the doors, fear and loneliness build and the barriers between 'modern' logical beliefs and old pagan traditions break down. It's an atmosphere in which the supernatural is easy to believe in, and Frederika's visions of wolves are as believable as the real animals.


 In the best tradition of murder mysteries, there's an abundance of suspects - despite the unpromising sparsely populated nature of the area. The indigenous nomadic Lapps, whose traditional grazing grounds are now being parcelled out to settlers as farms, are viewed with suspicion by the incomers and are the automatic suspects for anything untoward, but all of the settlers seem to have arrived at Blackasen with secrets or running away from something; from involvement in political or court intrigues to Paavo's fear of the sea or what we would see as post-traumatic shock in men returned from war. Maija's poking about uncovers all manner of things that people would rather have kept hidden!

Add to this the amazing descriptive passages capturing the endless days of Blackasen's brief summer or the incredible fury and power of a raging blizzard and it all makes for a very special book.




 Maryom's review - 5 stars
Publisher - Hodder & Stoughton
Genre - adult fiction, historical crime