Ellen Mattson

The colours may be black and white, but Mattson shows us in beautifully well-weighed language that life seldom is.

There is delightful period detail in food, dress and pop songs on tangle- prone cassette tapes, but older history is ever present in this sea-facing kingdom that is trying to turn its back on time.

Garbo wants her fellow Swedes to be proud of her for making a film that the whole world admires, and then to let her abdicate from Hollywood stardom.

‘The absurd is a reality, he thought, forming a snowball between his hands, there’s no need to twist the text to find it, it’s there all the time.’ Year of the Black Moon, a delightful but troubling existential detective novel, follows a disillusioned scholar on an epic quest for clues and meaning when his normal life is derailed by concussion.

Ellen Matsson's inheritance story is part psychological drama, part minutely-observed social history, part poetry.

A curated list of recent gems in Swedish-language literary fiction, as reviewed in Swedish Book Review.

A curated list of compelling historical fiction, as reviewed in Swedish Book Review.