The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles, By Roy Jacobsen, trs Don Bartlett & Don Shaw

This intimate novel by one of Norway's leading writers begins on 7 December 1939, when Russian troops invade the small Finnish town of Suomussalmi and find it evacuated but for one man: Timo the woodcutter, who finds he has a bond to the place that he cannot sever. As the distant drone of engines approaches, he vows that he will never go anywhere else. He watches the town go up in black smoke: homes, school, the church where he was christened.

Jacobsen excels in his portrait of what it means to be an outsider. When captured by the Russians, Timo is not killed, for despite declaring himself the "village idiot", his logging skills prove useful. In sparse, imagistic language filled with soot, sores, fire, frost and a recurring nightmare of being lost in a forest stumbling about like a "confused animal", the novel paints a powerful portrait of Timo's toughness and turmoil, and those qualities that separate wood from flesh and blood.

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