CLEARING OUT TRANSLATED BY BARBARA SJOHOLM

In a masterful blend of fiction and autobiography, a Norwegian novelist sends her character to the far north to learn what she can about their Sami ancestry Inspired by Helene Uri's own journey into her family's ancestry, Clearing Out, an emotionally resonant novel by one of Norway's most celebrated authors, tells two intertwining stories. A novelist, named Helene, is living in Oslo with her husband and children and contemplating her new protagonist, Ellinor Smidt--a language researcher, divorced and in her late thirties, with a doctorate but no steady job. An unexpected call from a distant relative reveals that Helene's grandfather, Nicolai Nilsen, was the son of a coastal (sjø) Sami fisherman--something no one in her family ever talked about. Uncertain how to weave this new knowledge into who she believes she is, Helene continues to write her novel, in which her heroine Ellinor travels to Finnmark in the far north to study the dying languages of the Sami families there. What Ellinor