Reviews

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

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

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.

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

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

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. ​

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?

‘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.’

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 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.

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.

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

‘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.’

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.

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. ​

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

The colours may be black and white, but Mattson shows us in beautifully well-weighed language that life seldom is.

When a snowstorm descends on the wedding party, it is so cold the knife won’t cut through the wedding cake and the bubbles freeze in the champagne glasses.