Reviews

Andrea Lundgren explores the borderlands of the human and natural worlds to create a northern magical realism with a dark, earthy undertow.

This first novel by Elin Willows is a vivid portrait of an anti-heroine.

‘To reclaim the word “spinster” is not in any way dangerous, destructive or pitiable – quite the reverse. […] All I am doing when I call myself a spinster is acknowledging my own story.

A graphic novel for young adults by Jessica Bab Bonde and Peter Bergting tells the stories of six survivors of the Holocaust. 'This book is arguably more necessary and urgent now than at any time in recent years.'

Boy meets girl at a dance school. Boy becomes a prominent scientist, girl becomes one of the first women to gain a doctorate in chemistry. Who is the genius from Breslau in Lena Einhorn's latest novel?

Impersonating a French journalist in order to meet the Rolling Stones, amorous interludes with older girls, and the endless search for jeans – even if cobbled together from heavy-duty sailcloth – these were all part of Maciej’s teenage years behind the Iron Curtain.

In his sixth novel Gunnar Ardelius returns to key issues facing young Swedes in the modern world.

With Maresi Red Mantle Maria Turtschaninoff confirms her status as an internationally renowned author of fantasy.

It is not often that an author successfully unleashes a riot of issues within a story which, far from turning the reader off, locks them into an uncomfortable embrace, steering them head-first into a volatile quest of trouble and turmoil. This is faultlessly accomplished by Joel Mauricio Isabel Ortiz in this debut novel.

National values always have a geographical and historical context: there is no immutable core of ‘Swedishness’, but a series of changing conceptions and expressions reacting to outside factors. This study examines how these key expressions have influenced Sweden’s development.

Neoscandia is a dystopia set in the future. This graphic novel by Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo and Catherine Anyango Grünewald is a page-turner that merits multiple re-readings and translation.

A haunted school, a mystery from the past and two classmates a world apart, in this acclaimed novel from Sara B. Elfgren

Investigative journalism at this level of intelligence and personal engagement is always more worthwhile than most other sources of ‘news’.

The first in a new fantasy quartet by award-winning Finland-Swedish author Karin Erlandsson.

This biography by Jens Liljestrand places the author Vilhelm Moberg in his historical and cultural context and demonstrates the ways in which he was often determinedly and independently at odds with his times.

The reader is struck by the sheer volume of Bergman’s arbetsböcker or workbooks, the A5 spiral blocks in which he wrote drafts: some sixty of them dating from 1938 to 2001 are preserved.

Duraid Al-Khamisi tells the powerful account of Middle Eastern current affairs in the language of an oriental storyteller.

‘If I could say what my body has in for it today what they do with it. I have no words for it the hands are just there and the pokes thumps pinches every day they’re there.’