Reviews
Curated and edited by Darcy Hurford
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Röd sol
Surrounded by heat in a tremulous world, India and Kallas answer an invitation from Kallas’ childhood best friend to leave summer in the city behind and visit her by the sea. Her garden house is an oasis, but in Red Sun nowhere is without a sense of unease.
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När jag var snö
Cherry trees in blossom, a dead cat, the Pleiades and mourning. In When I Was Snow Ingela Strandberg’s poetry takes us on a journey through nature where death and life go hand in hand.
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När allt är över
Charlotte Al-Khalili’s When Everything Is Over is a high-suspense novel with a focus on domestic violence and an unusual heroine.
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Den siste teaterdirektören. Berättelsen om Benny Fredriksson
Johan Hilton’s ‘story’ of Benny Fredriksson’s life and death is more than an engaging memoir of great contemporary theatre manager – it is also a forensic analysis of the process by which a respectable social media campaign, part of the international #MeToo movement, became an apparatus of persecution.
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Den yttersta vildmarkens historia: Kuben
Set in a bleak dystopian future, Nils Lundkvist’s debut The History of the Wilderness: The Cube is a suspenseful chapter book that can be devoured in one or two sittings.
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Sammanflätning
How to mourn a death that was never talked about, without even a grave to visit? In Intertwining, Pia Mariana Raattamaa Visén articulates how loss affects three subsequent generations.
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Kollokillen
How do you know if the person you have feelings for feels the same about you? Johan Ehn’s children’s book 12 Days of Summer navigates the unsafe waters of a fragile and intense first love.
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Ingen ro om natten
Karl Kofi Ahlqvist’s Restless Nights is a quietly powerful debut. The novel follows a man in his early twenties as he tries to make ends meet, flitting between part-time work and dating older women for money.
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Ödet och hoppet
In Hope and Destiny, set in a Sweden recovering from the ravages of the Black Death, a family of nobles attempts to wrest back control of their country. But fraught internal relations, coupled with the son’s unorthodox nature, end with the family divided against itself.
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Hundnätter
In Mirja Unge’s Dog Nights, a young woman returns to her home town after a long absence and finds some disturbing changes.
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Kulturbarn
Åsa Beckman sheds light on the traumatic experiences of children of writers in Culture Child: Growing Up in the Shadow of an Author
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Vargens unge
A tense account of murder and deceit in remote forest against the backdrop of the pandemic, Johanna Holmström’s Wolf Cub keeps the reader guessing until the end.
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Den stora kreditfesten. Historien om Klarna
Klarna is a trading success of our times, and part of a truly radical change, from analogue to digital, in the way we do trade. As Jonas Malmborg points out in The Big Credit Party: nowadays, hardly any financial transactions take place without digital mediation.
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Freja och huggormen
Fredrik Sonck’s Freja and the Snake is a clever picture book about the first time a child sees that her parents can make mistakes.
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Under
Wonder, Anna Ahlund’s older middle grade novel, is about a group of friends who each receive a mysterious postcard and the wonder this brings about.
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Spindelbjörken
Written in innocent yet poetic prose, Pär Hansson’s debut novel The Spider Birch reminds us of what it is like to be a child, in all its wonder and cruelty. At the same time, it leaves the reader with a disconcerting longing for closure. But maybe that is exactly what it means to be an adult: never managing to truly grasp our childhood, while never being able to let go of it either.
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Jag älskar Astrid Lindgren
Elin Lucassi's I love Astrid Lindgren is a moving graphic novel about postpartum psychosis.
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Drottning Margaretas dröm
In Queen Margaret's Dream Erik Petersson brings the complexity of gaining and holding on to power in the medieval era to life through the personality of Queen Margaret, and her achievement of uniting the crowns of Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 1397.