Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

Charlotte Al-Khalili’s When Everything Is Over is a high-suspense novel with a focus on domestic violence and an unusual heroine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Mirja Unge’s Dog Nights, a young woman returns to her home town after a long absence and finds some disturbing changes.

Åsa Beckman sheds light on the traumatic experiences of children of writers in Culture Child: Growing Up in the Shadow of an Author

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.