Reviews

Travelling between Dimension Homesickness and Dimension Viking Line, Edith Hammar's Homo Line is a graphic novel about dislocation, gentrification, and a lesser-known aspect of wartime Helsinki.

Love is love, even for young reindeer herders: Moa Backe Åstot's Polar Fire is a fresh take on teen romance from the far North.

Kjell Johansson has been writing insightful stories about people in insecure jobs since long before the lot of the precariat became the trendiest of socio-political topics. Bad People offers gripping insights into the different ways humanity is undermined by social insecurity.

Borderland is a new outing for Aino Trosell’s working-class heroine Siv Dahlin, who is now a postwoman in the remote region of Finnmark, where cuts in services are piling on the pressure and local sensibilities are stirred by both wolf attacks and refugee problems.

The year is 1676, and men and women stand accused of witchcraft and leading others into Satan’s clutches. In Sisela Lindblom's Burn!, one nasty little girl just wants to watch them burn.

In an expansive collection of poetry dealing explicitly with climate change and COVID-19, Malte Persson explores the meaning of time of and beyond humanity. Annihilation, ranging in scope from single poems to a 60-page epic, uses rhyme to impose a sense of order in an increasingly disordered world.

Eija Hetekivi Olsson's The Young Ones We Kill is an at times harrowing mother-daughter story about the consequences of bullying in schools, segregation in the suburbs of Gothenburg, and the love and fear of a mother fighting for her daughter.

Literary critic Rasmus Landström's The Return of Working-Class Literature offers a thorough survey and analysis of a uniquely Swedish publishing tradition that remains largely inaccessible to Anglophone readers.

They were once a professional couple living a comfortable, middle-class existence in Stockholm. Now Simon is missing and Jenny is searching for him. In Nidamörkur, Fröberg Idling combines a literary style with horror's ability to depict humanity's dark sides.

Överallt och ingenstans is a well-crafted, pleasantly meandering chapter book that brings together the small and big things in life, like cozy Friday nights, lice and complicated friendships.

Nattexpressen is an exciting story for children that opens up opportunities for conversations on a hard topic: how to talk about people who have changed or who are no longer themselves.

Kina Nilsson’s lapidary free verse poems, 77 of which are published in this anthology, are a testimony to the dedication of the hospital staff who have borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Beate Grimsrud's semi-autobiographical final novel - written in Swedish and self-translated into Norwegian - is an astonishing exploration of what it means for an individual life – ‘a giant dot’ – to be erased.

Lucia is 26 when she has a brain haemorrhage and is left with an impaired capacity to remember anything short-term. Josefin Roos' powerful novel draws on her own real-life experience to explore the complex terrain of brain damage.

Journalist Henrik Brandão Jönsson's fourth book is a short history of the Lusophone world that brings together several of the key Portuguese-speaking nations in one volume, providing insight into parts of the world readers may know little to nothing about.

Ola Larsmo's novel tells the story of Knut Oscar Broady, a Swedish emigrant whose life placed him in the midst of a number of crucial moments in both Swedish and American history.

This standalone sequel to Tre apor (Three Monkeys) clearly depicts the tension between staying with one’s own kind versus assimilation, and the challenges that come with belonging to various different groups.

För han var redan dö continues Eva Frantz's skillful series of stand-alone crime novels blending police procedurals with elements of noir, set against a backdrop of the rugged Finnish coast.