Flower Valley

From the award-winning Greenlandic author of Last Night in Nuuk comes a raw, powerful novel about a queer young Indigenous woman's spiral through colonial trauma and communal despair.

Flower Valley's unnamed narrator seems perched on the edge of the rest of her life. She lives with her caring family in Nuuk, loves her new girlfriend Maliina, and has just been accepted to university in Denmark. But even as the world seems wide open to her, nothing is quite right. Restless and depressed, she's preoccupied with death, cataloguing suicide statistics and losing herself in memories of those she has lost.

When she leaves home to study in Aarhus, she tries to steel her heart against grief and a maddening ache for Maliina. But she quickly sinks under the weight of her classes, the distance from her loved ones, and the flippant ignorance and biases of her Danish classmates. Feeling troubled and insecure, and struggling to cope, she senses everything closing in around her.

When Maliina's family experience an unimaginable loss, the narrator races back home to be with them in East Greenland. Here she encounters Flower Valley, 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 prevalent, few people talk about grief.

Flower Valley is at once a mordantly funny character portrait and a wrenching study of a community's struggle to address a mental health crisis. Written in sharp, incisive prose, Niviaq Korneliussen's second novel progresses to an emotionally devastating, unforgettable conclusion, laying the young narrator's destructive thought patterns painfully bare.