Reviews

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.

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 Sara Lundberg's The Day of Forgetting, we see that some days are just like that. You forget what you’re supposed to do or where you’re supposed to go. You might even embarrass yourself by getting things wrong. But don’t worry: we all know what it feels like, and we know it does get better.

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.

Mats Jonsson tried to avoid thinking about his Sámi heritage for decades. In When We Were Sámi he realises that he has no choice but to face it and to try to understand where Sámi people fit in Sweden’s history.

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.

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.

Cotton Angel, the first in Susanna Alakoski's epic quartet of novels covering the lives of four generations of working women, vividly depicts a Finnish cotton mill community during the years from Finland’s Civil War to the aftermath of World War II.

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.

The most recent work by veteran Swedish author Agneta Pleijel is an engaging novel centring on the real-life meeting in 1969 between Agatha Christie and the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ulrika Knutson's fascinating, vibrant biographical narrative explores the life of Elin Wägner, one of Sweden's most important writers of the early 1900s.

In Tullias värld, Kerstin Ekman sets out with grace, inventiveness and often anger to shed light on the hidden lives of the women of Ancient Rome.

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.

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.