Flower Valley

From award-winning Greenlandic author Niviaq Korneliussen comes a powerful queer coming-of-age story and a fearless exploration of identity, love, mental health, and feeling out of place in a culture where no one speaks of the dead.

Flower Valley in East Greenland is a place of outstanding natural beauty. It's also the site of a cemetery, a dense cluster of wooden crosses where colourful plastic flowers adorn the graves. Many of those buried there died by suicide, and in Greenland, a place where suicide is so widely prevalent, few people talk about grief.

The novel's unnamed protagonist, a young, queer Indigenous woman, has just been accepted to a university in Denmark, has a caring family, and a girlfriend she loves. But even as the world seems wide open to her, nothing is quite right. Feeling troubled and insecure, and struggling to cope, she senses everything beginning to close in around her.

Written in unforgettable prose that is both poetic and darkly humorous, Flower Valley progresses from the detached registration of deaths by suicide to its devastating conclusion, where the young woman's destructive thought patterns are laid painfully bare.