2006:1

The action of Stig Claesson's book takes place during a week in Tampere, Finland, following a man reporting on the World Amateur Boxing Championships in the spring of 1993.

Life on Mars is a poignant, funny book about how hard it can be to grow up. Joni is a self-confessed forty-something teenager, a Peter Pan figure, and in the end an unrepentant one. 

This is Åke Edwardson’s seventh novel featuring his Gothenburg detective Erik Winter, and like the other six in the series, it is strong on plot. 

Avskedsstafetten is the first novel by the poet, short story writer and visual artist Johanna Ekström. The novel is mainly set in Notting Hill, where the Swedish heroine hopes to recuperate after the break-up of her marriage in Sweden. 

A lonely, divorced writer reflects on his life. Evander’s beautiful prose and sense of humour, which sometimes lighten up the tragic scenes, persuade the reader to have patience with the narcissistic ‘I’.

This second novel from Kristian Fredén has a literary irony, an understated humour and an extended chess motif providing both plot and metaphor which is inevitably reminiscent of Nabokov’s The Defence.

This rich, thought-provoking novel introduces convincing Chinese and Western characters and places them against momentous political events of the twentieth century. 

With its ingenious, tragi-comic plot, richness of characterization and spot-on psychology, this is a book that really speaks to anyone trapped in the daily grind. It lives on in the mind long after the last page is read.

Swedish journalist and novelist David Lagercrantz’s venture into mountaineering fiction is a very creditable addition to the field. 

Elisabeth Lindfors’ second work of fiction consists of diary entries and letters written from within a crumbling north-European dystopia.

In her most recent book, Bodil Malmsten presents five plaintive, indignant and unhappy souls; five contemporary Swedes from various walks of life, imparting to us their glum observations on life and their tales of disillusionment and personal distress. 

In these thirteen short pieces of prose Harry Martinson’s prose recreates the natural world of meadow and forest as sharply and imaginatively as his poetry. 

“On offer here is the shameful ingredient that once made great literature read: entertainment”, says Horace Engdahl, the Permanent Secretary of The Swedish Academy, about Östergren’s fiction in a quote on the dust jacket.