Reviews

‘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.

With her feminist dystopia, Karam joins acclaimed authors such as Johannes Anyuru and Jonas Hassen Khemiri in carving out space for a new speculative fiction emanating from Sweden – one that renews the genre by foregrounding questions of diversity and race in a place so often idealised as a social utopia. ​

A simmering portrait of a soured sibling relationship, and a richly layered contemplation of memory and the imprints left by childhood trauma.

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.

Rattle Rustle Walk is a lovely collection of poetry that is just right for young readers and they, like the tree in winter with its leaves falling, will be sad when it is over.

The old school of fairy tales – the ones that make even adults afraid to walk through the woods alone.

Although the refugee crisis was depicted by press and politicians as a crisis in Sweden, Banke’s book is a timely reminder that the asylum seekers are in fact the ones facing a crisis.

‘The real world, the one outside, does not want to take her… She refused to obey. They beat her black and blue at the penitentiary but she still did not do what she was told, and they realised in the end that they would have to kill her or send her to hospital. So it was the hospital.'

In fact, the word ‘opinion’ has no plural in the local language. While Parisian intellectuals have mooted the idea of a prototypical kilogram, the narrator is startled to discover Thule’s equivalent: a ‘standard national Opinion’, protected by a glass dome.