Reviews

Authoritarianism, rhetoric and protest: scenes from daily life. Anna-Lena Laurén's The Velvet Dictatorship. Resistance and fellow-travellers in today’s Russia. is a highly readable collection of essays on contemporary Russia written by an expert in the area.

A woman is admitted to a secure psychiatric ward claiming she needs to prevent a terrorist attack. In the suspenseful thriller Black sun, Andreas Norman unpicks a white supremacist conspiracy to assassinate the Swedish prime minister.

In Ann-Helén Laestadius' Stolen, a nine-year-old Sámi girl in Arctic Sweden witnesses a hate crime. The trauma will remain with her into young adulthood, when she will battle for the rights of her people – and herself as a future reindeer herder.

After more than two hundred years, Sweden’s national poet finally has a literary biography. In Bellman. The Biography, Carina Burman sketches the life of Carl Michael Bellman in a lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched work.

The Swedish word sorgearbete (mourning) evokes the work we do to process our sorrow. The Singularity, the latest novel from Kurdish-Swedish author Balsam Karam, is the embodiment of such work, and can only be described as lyrical, stirring, and immensely powerful.

The Wolf Run, the latest novel by doyenne of Swedish literature, Kerstin Ekman, resonates with a wisdom deeply rooted in nature.

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.

In the middle-grade novel Lindormars land, Frida Nilsson writes about the need and desire for love and about the difficult choices we sometimes have to make.

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.