Fiona Graham

Impersonating a French journalist in order to meet the Rolling Stones, amorous interludes with older girls, and the endless search for jeans – even if cobbled together from heavy-duty sailcloth – these were all part of Maciej’s teenage years behind the Iron Curtain.

‘To reclaim the word “spinster” is not in any way dangerous, destructive or pitiable – quite the reverse. […] All I am doing when I call myself a spinster is acknowledging my own story.

Nicolas de Condorcet, mathematician, philosopher and a member of the first government formed during the French Revolution, championed the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual and religious liberty, rationality, and increased economic freedom.

A graphic novel for young adults by Jessica Bab Bonde and Peter Bergting tells the stories of six survivors of the Holocaust. 'This book is arguably more necessary and urgent now than at any time in recent years.'

In her remarkable book, Elin Anna Labba gives multiple voices to those dispossessed during the forced displacement of Sámi reindeer herders in the 1920s and 1930s.

Pooneh Rohi's melancholy, haunting novel affords a penetrating insight into what it means to have a composite identity formed by different, conflicting cultures, and how that condition can affect one’s life choices.

In fact, the word ‘opinion’ has no plural in the local language. While Parisian intellectuals have mooted the idea of a prototypical kilogram, the narrator is startled to discover Thule’s equivalent: a ‘standard national Opinion’, protected by a glass dome.

'...the situation is hopeless ... Perhaps its serious nature will nonetheless lead us to something that we might almost be able to call hope.’

Profoundly humane, inviting the young reader to sympathise with the underdog.

A psychological study of sexual and family relationships which relies for much of its tension on folktale imagery.

Maria (Mary to her friends), a 23-year-old architecture student, has just discovered that she is expecting a baby.

Doris is a determined little girl who knows her own mind. And what she wants is to finish the civil engineering project she’s working on in her sandpit, not to go out for afternoon tea – particularly when that means putting on a pink flouncy frock rather than her favourite sailor suit.

Nothing is what it seems in Edenborg’s counterfactual historical romance.

We have two different parents: one called Yeltsin, the other Putin.

‘Of course, Stalin wasn’t as perfect as Putin’.

Överallt och ingenstans is a well-crafted, pleasantly meandering chapter book that brings together the small and big things in life, like cozy Friday nights, lice and complicated friendships.

‘None of us can say we didn’t know. Now you know too’.

Kina Nilsson’s lapidary free verse poems, 77 of which are published in this anthology, are a testimony to the dedication of the hospital staff who have borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic.

An ambitious exploration of what it means to be human.

'I was born ready to flee.' Elisabeth Åsbrink's genre-bending book portrays three generations of women against the background of Jewish diaspora history.

A fascinating blend of fiction and historical fact embracing classicist aesthetics, rumbustious lowlife and Enlightenment political thought, it draws the reader into an enthralling world of intellectual hedonism.

In Ann-Helén Laestadius' Stolen, a nine-year-old Sámi girl in Arctic Sweden witnesses a hate crime. The trauma will remain with her into young adulthood, when she will battle for the rights of her people – and herself as a future reindeer herder.

Cotton Angel, the first in Susanna Alakoski's epic quartet of novels covering the lives of four generations of working women, vividly depicts a Finnish cotton mill community during the years from Finland’s Civil War to the aftermath of World War II.

The voices of writers and poets from across the Sámi lands of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia ring out with the clarity of reindeer bells in Sápmi from the Inside: Testimonies from Stolen Land.

Hidden Gods: About Everything That Doesn’t Get Lost in a Translation explores the art of literary translation down the centuries with a delectably dry wit.

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

A curated list of recent highlights in narrative non-fiction, as reviewed in Swedish Book Review.

A curated list of recent highlights in picture books and chapter books for young readers, as reviewed in Swedish Book Review.

Celebrating Women in Translation Month, with a selection of writers and works presented in translation on Swedish Book Review.

Kayo Mpoyi's Kitoko (meaning ‘beautiful’) is the touching story of how a little girl helps her father find hope again.

Punishment depicts life in a harsh 1950s boarding school for the children of Sámi reindeer herders, and how those children grapple with their trauma thirty years on.

A Crate of Oranges tells the moving real-life story of a Jewish boy and his father forced by persecution to emigrate from Communist Poland.

Whatever happened to memory in the former dictatorships of Central Europe? Shots in Slovakia: A Central European Tragedy highlights the shortcomings in remembrance culture that continue to hold these societies back.

Elisabeth Åsbrink's My Big, Beautiful Hatred portrays a gifted writer torn apart by the conflicting demands that late nineteenth-century society placed on female authors and intellectuals.