Rick McGregor

The book is very much a meta-novel. Its nine chapters consist of nine parables, corresponding perhaps to the nine leaves torn from the centre of his long-dead father’s poetry notebook. The notebook had recently come into the author’s hands, even though he had long believed that his strongly religious mother had burnt the notebook. To her way of thinking, poetry was sinful. Parables, however, were acceptable.

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 colon in the title ushers the reader into this world, the world of the beautiful but socially inept, and a world made up of triangles.

After poetry collections and a first novel, Moodysson trained as a film-maker; this further novel marks his return to prose writing.

Sara Stridsberg's novel engages in an interesting way with its source material: Nabokov's Dolores Haze (Lolita).