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Cecilia Ekbäck’s novel is worth the admission price for the title metaphor alone. According to the afterword, the expression “Wolf Winter”—in Swedish Vargawinter—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 time that imprints on you that you are mortal, and, at the end of the day, always alone. That's a remarkable charge of meaning for a single word.

Actually, Wolf Winter has a fair amount to recommend it besides the title, especially for a first novel. The writing is excellent—as spare and bleak and chill as you might hope for in a novel set in eighteenth-century Swedish Lapland. Ekbäck conjures this remote world with great vividness. The narrative plays out mainly in the cruel, wolf-haunted, mountainous terrain of Blackåsen, where a motley assortment of settlers eke out a desperately poor living in their far-flung homesteads. The other main settings are a desolate town, near-deserted all year round apart from Church festivals, and a Lapp—or Sami—camp, scene of a single disturbing episode. The tense relationship between the Swedish and Finnish settlers and the native Sami is one of the running themes of the novel, as is the tension between Christian belief and a more ancient, spirit-rich, pantheistic sensibility.

Ekbäck uses a murder mystery format to structure the narrative, and the novel bowls along happily in that vein for quite a while, piling suspicion upon suspicion and clue upon clue. I was gripped for about the first two thirds of it, but after that point, the narrative began to unravel. There are too many twists and revelations and dark secrets unveiled in close succession, as if Ekbäck couldn’t decide among a number of potential endings and decided to throw them all into the mix. The magic-realist element, delicately etched in at first, is laid on with a trowel towards the end of the novel. Ekbäck’s attempts to integrate her fictional narrative with the political history of the period are rather strained and flimsy, as well.

Still, I don't want to be too negative about this novel. Its was an absorbing read for the most part, its narrative glitches redeemed by the quality of the writing. I’ll be intrigued to see how Ekbäck’s writing develops from here.