Two siblings, one crime.
One long-buried secret.
17-year-old Ellen never wanted a holiday. What is there to do in a mining town in the northernmost corner of the country, with no one but her brother Simon – a boy with Asperger’s and obsessed with detective stories – for company?
Nothing, until they stumble upon a horrifying crime scene that brings them into a generations-long conflict between the townspeople and the native Sami. When the police dismiss Simon’s findings, he decides to track down the perpetrator himself. Ellen reluctantly helps, drawn in by a link between the crime and the siblings’ own past.
What started off as a tedious holiday soon escalates into a dangerous journey through hatred, lies and self-discovery that makes Ellen question not only the relationship to her parents, but also her own identity.
The Author
Josephine Greenland, born 1995, is a Swedish author currently working as a teacher in Edinburgh.
She has a BA in English from the University of Exeter and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in 14 journals online and in print.
Embers is her first novel, and was written during her MA.
Latest from my blog
My Year in Writing – 2025
So, the year 2025 comes to a close. A Universal Year 9 in the world of numerology, closing the nine year cycle that begin in 2016. It has been both a quiet and eventful writing for me, with conclusions to some projects being made, to make the way for new adventures in 2026. Here comes a summary of the most notable take-aways/ experiences and achievements I have made this year.
The Writer’s Diary: 2. The Eleventh Draft
In a workshop I attended recently, one of the other writers shared a piece of insight into the writing process she’d learned from working with Canadian writer Michael Winter. A story, he said, has eleven drafts. No matter how long or short it is.
This was an interesting for me to think about in relation to my own work – specifically my second novel. I have spent five and a half years working on it, going through several complete and vastly different drafts. It went through six rewrites before I finally had the story where I wanted it to be, after which I soldiered on with finer edits, ironing out grammatical mistakes, fine tuning characterisation and little droplets of exposition.
The Writer’s Diary: 1. Hidden Conflict
It’s been a hot minute since I last posted. Travel to Sweden to see family, festivals, getting married (also in Sweden) and starting to teach at university have all pushed the Substack to the backburner for a while. Settled in at university, making progress on my third novel and polishing up my second novel, I feel like I’m back in the head space where I can post here regularly. I will aim to post every Wednesday, sometimes it may be every other, but I do want to be consistent moving forward, as I’ve realised there is a quite a lot I want to say.
My 2025 Writing Resolution
Writing less can seem like a counter-intuitive goal for a writer, yet it is something I have been thinking increasingly much about in the past few months. In December, when I submitted the manuscript for my second novel to my editor, it had seen tis way through approximately 7 drafts, with some parts probably having been revised and rewritten ten times. The amount of words that have gone into this novel since I started it five and a half years ago has probably surpassed half a million by now, and I know that more words will be added once my editor returns her edits.