Flower Valley: A Novel [9781558619654]

Overview

An ode to queer heartache amid the ruin of colonization from Greenland’s emerging literary star.

In East Greenland, a field by stunning fells and a stinking stream blooms with plastic flowers year round: Naasuliardarpi, or Flower Valley, an unofficial graveyard for victims of the region’s suicide epidemic. The unnamed narrator of Flower Valley is no stranger to the gravitational pull of grief, having lost her best friend to suicide at age thirteen. With the support of her raucous family and her mercurial girlfriend Maliina, she tries to avoid the same fate. Attending college in Copenhagen, she tolerates her Danish peers who barely hide their biases against Indigenous Greenlanders, but school grows harder to balance as crisis brews at home. When Maliina calls her for help, she drops everything and dives headfirst into a familiar vortex. 

In Niviaq Korneliussen’s wrenching, bleakly funny second novel, her unnamed narrator chases the thrills of sapphic love against all sense and odds, channeling the mordant humor of her community on the brink even as she unravels.