Available Formats
Hardback, Large Print Edition
Published: 16th August 2023
Paperback
Published: 24th September 2024
Paperback
Published: 3rd June 2025
Hardback
Published: 24th January 2023
The End of Drum-Time
By (Author) Hanna Pylvinen
Swift Press
Swift Press
24th September 2024
4th July 2024
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Historical fiction
813.6
Paperback
368
Width 135mm, Height 216mm
Shortlisted for the National Book Award
A story of forbidden love and fugitive faith in the nineteenth century Arctic Circle
'Transports readers deep into an unfamiliar world, yet with familiar conflicts and desires. I was absorbed and changed. Absolutely beautiful' Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl With a Pearl Earring
In 1851, at a remote village in the Scandinavian tundra, a Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse tries in vain to convert the native Sami reindeer herders to his faith. But when one of the most respected herders has a dramatic awakening and dedicates his life to the church, his impetuous son, Ivvar, is left to guard their diminishing herd alone. By chance, he meets Mad Lasse's daughter Willa, and their blossoming infatuation grows into something that ultimately crosses bordersof cultures, of beliefs, and of political dividesas Willa follows the herders on their arduous annual migration north to the sea.
Gorgeously written and sweeping in scope, Hanna Pylvainen's The End of Drum-Time immerses readers in a world lit by the northern lights, steeped in age-old rituals, and guided by passions that transcend place and time.
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'Transports readers deep into an unfamiliar world, yet with familiar conflicts and desires. I was absorbed and changed. Absolutely beautiful' - Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl With a Pearl Earring
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'The End of Drum-Time is a novel like no other. It is as much a historical epic as it is an intimate love storyas much a vast cultural record as it is a detailed study of a person's soul. It is infinitely rich and rewarding. In these pages, Hanna Pylvainen tells a story of love, faith, reindeer herding, and human failing. She has written a masterpiece' - Julia Phillips, author of the National Book Award finalist Disappearing Earth
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'One of the most unique voices in American literature, Hanna Pylvainen occupies a space shared by the Scandinavian writers Kerstin Ekman, Tove Jansson, and, beyond that, 19th century masters. The End of Drum-Time brings the readers to a recent past, a distant land, and proves that the complexity of human nature is as relevant and timeless as the ancient landscape. A triumph from the first page to the last!' - Yiyun Li
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'The End of Drum-Time explores some of the most complex themes in literature in some of the most gorgeous prose imaginable. Hanna Pylvainen's novel of cultural collision in the far north is an extraordinary feat of research and imagination by an author who reminds you with every page what fiction can accomplish' - Anthony Marra, New York Times bestselling author of Mercury Pictures Present
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Hanna Pylvinen is the author of the novel We Sinners, which received a Whiting Award and a Balcones Fiction Prize. To research The End of Drum-Time, her second novel, she spent six months with Smi reindeer herders in Finland. She lives in Philadelphia.