Reviews

In this biography of Katarina Taikon, one of the twentieth century’s foremost advocates for human rights in Sweden, Lawen Mohtadi weaves together general Romani history, Taikon’s family background, Taikon’s own story, depictions of life in Romani camps, and Mohtadi’s own experiences researching and writing this book.

A novel of violence and feelings.

Now Masha, Tolstoy’s favourite child, comes into focus, completing the Russian triptych.

‘How grandiose, eccentric, depressive, suicidal, bizarre, queer or sexually affirmative can a woman be before she is labelled insane?’

Doris is a determined little girl who knows her own mind. And what she wants is to finish the civil engineering project she’s working on in her sandpit, not to go out for afternoon tea – particularly when that means putting on a pink flouncy frock rather than her favourite sailor suit.

A secret concealed in the communal laundry: a tub full of pulsating black goo that craves blood and offers in return irresistible mystical transports.

Maria (Mary to her friends), a 23-year-old architecture student, has just discovered that she is expecting a baby.

That magical, belly-flipping fizz of first love.

This is the kind of book likely to elicit the attention of gatekeepers in the world of YA fiction.

Virdborg’s whole book can be read as a descent into hell.

What remains from Ray Bradbury’s story is an existential ambivalence about the end of a life, and of the novel itself in the face of inevitability.

Who but an artist could better interpret for the rest of us just what it is like to be mentally ill?

Joyful purples and blues dominate the second phase of the journey, the sea crossing, with its gloriously calm starry skies and tranquil moon.

It’s a kind of community rarely portrayed in literature.

Something rotten at the heart of the Finland-Swedish academic and literary establishment.

A carefully made documentary in print: two skilful communicators have joined forces to stimulate readers into learning more about their special subject.

Jessica Schiefauer’s thorough examination of neo-Nazis, hate crime and homoeroticism resists simplification and reminds us of the thin line we all tread when we choose how to treat each other.

As the pages turn, each successive image zooms out, first to the park, then to the town, countryside, ocean, earth, moon and eventually the solar system.