Reviews

Nicolas de Condorcet, mathematician, philosopher and a member of the first government formed during the French Revolution, championed the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual and religious liberty, rationality, and increased economic freedom.

In a powerful story of loss, Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde asks the difficult questions.

Just how much is likely to have changed between two people who have had no contact with each other for twenty years? Why would one of them suddenly arrive on the other’s doorstep after such an absence anyway?

Far from being a typical whodunnit, the novel explores the buying of sex – illegal in Sweden – from three very different angles.

In Hemmet, a horror novel set in a care home, Mats Strandberg sidesteps clichés to produce a haunting tale of dementia and the greatest fear of all; losing control of ourselves.

Markus Heilig, a psychiatrist turned neuroscientist, has set himself an ambitious project: to explain sex differences in brain structure and function and to show what happens in brains – not just the human one – at different stages of development.

The boy is not her son, and she calls him ‘my boy’ because ‘she took him’ and ‘because he was in my power’.

‘Even during lunch the women and men sit in different sections of the restaurant, with screens between them. It is considered ugly for a woman to open her mouth in public. And that is not only to eat, but also to speak.’

A collection of six interconnected short stories by Danny Wattin. Sharp and entertaining.

It rings true on so many levels, and women especially will relate very personally to this intimate story of the painful transition from girlhood to womanhood. ​

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.’

Kristina Appelqvist has been described as the queen of a type of whodunnit in which the various pieces of the puzzle are carefully crafted and assembled as the novel progresses.

‘Always the same question when it comes to people. Whose will was stronger?’

A skilled wordsmith and nature writer, Niemi juxtaposes lyrical pastoral beauty with the grotesque and the hideous. He is able to enchant, lull and repulse in equal measure. This is writing that will make you think.

But we are pulled back from the brink: what if the notion of humanity being in charge is, after all, an enabling, hopeful story to tell ourselves?

‘Holy forests, / where every tree within itself / bears a thousand icons, which were not painted by human hand. / See, a vast forest of icons!’