Reviews
Curated and edited by Darcy Hurford
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Till träden
In To the Trees Ella-Maria Nutti explores the importance of language and culture to a sense of self and a feeling of belonging.
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Slask
Together since childhood, it is no longer possible for Melvin and his friends to take their bonds for granted, nor assume what those bonds mean for each other anymore in Mikael Berglund’s novel Slush.
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Kattflickan och andra berättelser
Catgirl and Other Stories is a new collection of graphic short stories by Anneli Furmark that brings together evocative illustrations and melancholic humour.
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Stinas jojk
Mats Jonsson's Stina's joik is a moving YA graphic novel about a Sámi woman who used her extreme height to earn money for her family, while never fully living her own life.
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Pythian pratar
Influencers, consumer culture and Meghan Markle writing positive messages on bananas: Liv Strömquist’s graphic novel The Pythia Talks takes on wellness culture and our fear of death.
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Chop Chop: En tapper jordbos berättelse
In Chop Chop: The Story of Brave Earthling Linda Bondestam tells a complex and appealing story about a good-natured robot.
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Gloria. I Rasismens Skugga
The story of one of the Little Rock Nine, Gloria. In the Shadow of Oppression is co-authored by Gloria Ray Karlmark and Elisabeth Åsbrink.
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En oändligt lång vår
In An Endlessly Long Spring, translator Lida Starodubtseva proves her mettle on a different side of the creative process.
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Medan vi lever
In her latest book, While We’re Living, Nina Björk deep-dives into the waters of existential philosophy. In seven chapters, she discusses authenticity, identity, meaning, trust, love, time, and reality – impressive topics to tackle.
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Sten i siden
In Stone in Silk, Mikael Niemi describes a Finnish-speaking northern Sweden set in a period far from the egalitarian social democracy we think of today.
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Hur man möter en mamma
How We Met Your Mother by Kaj Korkea-aho is memoir about a gay male couple and their desire to have a child.
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Första boken
Karolina Ramqvist’s The First Book weaves through different tenses and times, interlacing stories like sections of a long braid. There are many lenses through which one could read it, and Ramqvist never sticks to just one.
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Gärna ville jag vara ett träd
Twelve poems for young readers by Barbro Lindgren, I’d Like to Be a Tree encourages young readers to connect with nature.
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Man kan fly en galning men kan inte gömma sig för ett samhälle - 10 år efter Utøya
In You Can Escape a Crazy Man But Not Hide From a Society – 10 Years after Utøya, Ali Esbati documents his first-hand experiences of the mass shooting on the Norwegian island of Utøya, and the ominous political and cultural atmosphere that pervaded before and after it.
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Medan kriget pågår finns ingen försoning. Texter om Ryssland och Ukraina 2022-2024
While the War Is Ongoing There Is No Reconciliation is a collection of articles published in Sweden and Finland over the past two years by Anna-Lena Laurén, Russian correspondent of sixteen years.
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Huset vid Pärlälvens slut
William Älgebrink's The House at the End of the Pärl River is a thriller-horror story about a search for blood.
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Smugglarens skatt
In The Smuggler’s Treasure, a young boy visits his grandma on an island in the archipelago and discovers a 100-year-old smuggling mystery that he needs to solve before criminals do.
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Att trösta ett monster
What do you do when a very sad, but very big monster turns up at the door? In To Comfort a Monster, Jesper Cederstrand and Clara Dackenberg answer this question.
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Den store konstnären
In The Great Artist, Emmy Abrahamson and Hanna Jedvik’s first of a planned series of novels together, we meet one of the most unlikely double acts in contemporary crime fiction who end up a qualified success.
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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.