I loved Miller’s 2025 novel Red Dog Farm, so I searched for his previous books and found this one from 2021. Similar to Red Dog, Stockholm Sven is primarily a study in character and place–and of limited, but deep, relationships. Its simplicity in plot allows its complexity in character and inner thoughts to become the focus. 

Fiction written as Sven’s memoir, he’s looking back on his life–starting in his late 20s when he had “amounted to nothing” in Stockholm having quit a series of mill jobs and taken on the role of nanny to his depressed sister’s children, something he found much more fulfilling. But nothing seemed as interesting as all the polar exploration books he had read as a child, so when his sister saw an ad for jobs in Spitsbergen (the former name of Svalbard, Norway’s archipelago in the arctic circle), he headed north–as a miner, not an explorer. 

He arrived in 1916 and spent the next several decades there, briefly in the mines until an avalanche crushed his face, and then as a steward in a mining camp, and eventually in the far north as a trapper and a hunter, much of it by himself. 

He vacillates between fighting depression and finding a zealousness in his daily life, admitting in the prologue that like most people, his life is “substantially more curious and mundane” than the “milestones and monoliths” that many people think of as life. 

Sven builds deep, life-long friendships with Tapio, his Finnish trapping mentor and with MacIntyre, a Scottish Geologist and fellow bibliophile. Sven’s Stockholm niece Helga arrives one day in his Northernmost fjord, Raudfjjordan, along with her newborn baby, Skuld. And these two humans fulfill Sven’s life in his remote world where total darkness descends 3 months of every year, where a supply boat might arrive twice a year, and where his tiny cabin is all that shelters him from the wind and cold, and where one begins to “think like a walrus.”

I loved this quiet, contemplative, and charming story that keeps us rooting for our main character in his arctic wilderness. And having been to Svalbard (as a tourist in 2023, not a miner or trapper in 1917), I so appreciated the descriptions of landscapes I visited more than 100 years later–still quite remote, still full of calving glaciers, reindeer, and breathless expanses of beauty.