Between Shades of Gray

Ruta Sepetys's first novel, Between Shades of Gray, was published in 2011 and has also appeared under the title Ashes in the Snow. The story takes place in the middle of the twentieth century, during the Stalinist repressions, and is told in the voice of Lina Vilkas, who is fifteen and wants to be an artist; she lives in Kaunas, Lithuania, with her mother and father and her younger brother Jonas.

It is 14 June 1941 when the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, come to the family home, and Lina, her mother and Jonas are given twenty minutes to change their clothes and gather what they can carry before being arrested and deported with hundreds of other Lithuanians. They are loaded into a crowded cattle car for a journey east, with Lina's father taken elsewhere and no word of where any of them are going. The forty-six people travelling with Lina include an older man she nicknames the bald man; Ona, whose newborn baby was with her when she was seized at a hospital; and Andrius, a seventeen-year-old who becomes important to her. Lina draws and passes coded messages between the cars in the hope that word will reach her father, and the group moves from the transport to forced labour on a collective farm and then to a camp above the Arctic Circle, in hunger and cold.

The novel was nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal in 2012, and translations now run to more than twenty-seven languages. A film adaptation followed in 2018 as Ashes in the Snow.