Stef Penney’s book: It’s a wrap!
Stef Penney's next novel will be a mystery set in Fauske and Sulitjelma, in Nordland, northern Norway. The story will centre around Russ celebrations and feature a gallery of exciting characters - some with names inspired by real locals. Here is an update on her book.
Writer: Stef Penney
Well, 2024 is here, and happily, before Christmas, I finally finished writing my Norwegian novel. At last it has a name – The Long Water. Somehow this feels like the right title; I hope those who read it will agree. It came after much poring over maps, photos and YouTube videos of the valley that runs from Fauske to Sulis, where the action of the novel takes place.
When people in the UK think of Northern Norway, they tend to picture fjords and midnight sun, dramatic scenery, reindeer, the Northern lights and pristine, snowy wilderness. Which is true, of course, but it’s also a bit of a cliché. Because of that, and because the books I’ve read that are set in Nordland have been mostly about the sea, fishing and farming – often focusing on the hardships of life in the past, I was drawn to the present day and also to look further inland, away from the ‘famous’ views. This led me to Sulitjelma and Jakobsbakken and the now defunct iron mines – and I started thinking about what happens to places and communities once the original reason for their existence has gone. The landscape near the border is less well known than that of the coast, although it it seems (from photos I’ve seen) to be just as beautiful in a different way. At the same time, I was sure this was going to be contemporary story – something I’ve never done before.
Once I had developed the characters in my mind – and this is a process that even I don’t fully understand – the story itself began to crystallise around them. It is a story with two strands: one is totally contemporary and features Elin and Benny – two teenagers who live in Sulis and attend the high school in Fauske. Their lives and those of their families are thrown into upheaval when a popular student from the school goes missing during the time of Russ celebrations. The shock affects everyone in the area. During the subsequent search and police investigation, discoveries are made that provoke more questions than answers. In particular, when the police open a long-disused mine in the mountains above Sulis, they find human remains – but this body has been there for decades, its identity a mystery. In the tight-knit community, everyone is affected, including Elin’s grandmother, Svea, and the missing boy’s grandfather, Odd Emil.
The story is told from the perspectives of various people in the community who lives intertwine – students, parents and grandparents, teacher, vicar, police officer… but it is Svea who ties the two strands of the story together. She is a misanthrope who throughout her long life has never allowed anyone to get too close, and the reason for that lies in the past, stretching back through the years when the valley was a profitable iron mine, to the bitter aftermath of the German Occupation in WWII.
I hope I have been able to combine the narrative propulsion of a story with a mystery at its heart (or two mysteries) with some aspects of life that have most concerned me over the past few years: how the roles and choices of women have changed over the last half century, the tensions between generations, and the way trauma is passed down from parent to child – despite everyone’s best efforts.
It has been fantastic to open my mind to ideas that would never have come to me on my own, and a joy to speak to the people who have written and spoken to me about their experiences and memories. I especially enjoyed talking to the young people who came to the virtual writing workshops and shared their stories and opinions – in extraordinarily, shamingly good English. It is thanks to them that I learned about the Russ: a phenomenon that has no parallel in this country (or anywhere else as far as I know) and it became a key part of the story.
It is also great to be able to name many characters in the book after those locals who have generously offered up their identities – I hope no one is disappointed (or shocked) at the results! In a novel, not every character will be sympathetic or admirable, so in some cases I split first and last names and recombined them. I know nothing of the people to whom the names originally belong, so characters named after them bear no relation to any real people – at least that I know about! Any resemblance, as they say, is purely coincidental…
I’m currently waiting for Jane Wood, my editor at Quercus, to finish her notes, and then we will embark on the editing process. It’s a part of writing that I really enjoy. Once I have had some time away from the book I can clear my head and gain the necessary critical distance – then I get to make it better (which means, more often than not, chopping out the boring bits). I hope we can get some Norwegian readers involved in this process too.
The English edition is scheduled for publication on July 4th 2024, and I hope that before then we will have a Norwegian publisher too, so that a translation will be in the works. I can’t wait.
Read more about this special book project with award-winning Scottish author Stef Penney here (The project was formerly called The Book of Nordland):
https://www.bodo2024.no/prosjekter/the-book-of-nordland
Read an interview with Stef Penney here:
https://www.bodo2024.no/nyheter/interview-with-stef-penney