Reviews

Originally published in 1980 to great acclaim, Antti Jalava’s Asphalt Flower is something of a Sweden Finn classic. It views Stockholm through the eyes of Erkki, an aspiring author and second-generation immigrant from Finland.

Finland, 1942. Residents returning to the evacuated town of Hanko begin to rebuild their lives, their relationships and the hometown they love in a time of war. Karin Collin’s Where My Heart Is is the last part of a trilogy on Hanko during WW2.

Alva Hedlund's debut work of poetry, Owned, is an intimate and sharp exploration of the inextricability of the self and others. 

Enter the strange dystopian world of The Dog Owners and its sequel The Cat Hunters, where dogs are third-class citizens on a mission to reclaim their freedom. And where the human boy Martin is on his own difficult journey to find his father.

A story of watch thefts and information leaks told skilfully from multiple narrative viewpoints. A Thief and a Police Officer is Johan Eriksson's fiction debut.

Set in the late 1970s, Monika Fagerholm’s Nowhere Land/Women in Revolt is a story of creative development and female revolt, with Baader-Meinhof looming in the background. It starts when Alice moves to the suburbs and ends with her becoming a writer.

In Chop Chop: The Story of Brave Earthling Linda Bondestam tells a complex and appealing story about a good-natured robot.

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.

In An Endlessly Long Spring, translator Lida Starodubtseva proves her mettle on a different side of the creative process.

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.

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.

How We Met Your Mother by Kaj Korkea-aho is memoir about a gay male couple and their desire to have a child.

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.

Twelve poems for young readers by Barbro Lindgren, I’d Like to Be a Tree encourages young readers to connect with nature.

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.

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.

William Älgebrink's The House at the End of the Pärl River is a thriller-horror story about a search for blood.

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.