Reviews

The setting, the ‘Indian village’ – a nickname for the flats belonging to the local Volvo factory – symbolises the democratic dream of providing a decent life for all workers. But the dream of equality is trashed by the brokenness of those who live there today.

Kristina Sandberg’s monumental trilogy about Maj Berglund, a housewife from the small town of Örnsköldsvik, is a tour de force.

We have two different parents: one called Yeltsin, the other Putin.

Saga is a strong female character; it’s a delight to read a novel about a teenage girl who finds her own way and isn’t afraid of being different.

‘Bonsai cats’ are cats which were stuffed into glass vessels as kittens to restrict their physical growth and so become moulded into an unnatural shape at the will of their owners. Human children may, in a comparable way, be brought up forcibly conditioned, in the social bottles adults squeeze them into.

One should expect nothing less from a press born of the short-lived magazine Const Literary (P)review.

Haridi grapples with tricky subjects such as mental illness and urban poverty from a child’s skewed perspective.

It is natural as time passes to re-evaluate our relationship with our late parents.

Alsterdal has been carving out a niche as a writer of page-turners with a political, international flavour.

‘Of course, Stalin wasn’t as perfect as Putin’.

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.

Do not choose to read it alone, in a house with many large, curtainless windows, standing on its own.

‘None of us can say we didn’t know. Now you know too’.

Kallifatides has created a powerful portrait of a remarkable woman, who overcomes the privations of her childhood to become a respected painter of icons.

A complicated but nicely plotted cloak-and-dagger thriller, sweetened by an affair of the heart, inside a narrative framework based on recent and not-so-recent historical fact.

Harrison has produced an outstandingly readable book that delivers a clear account of the War, skilful assessment of its events, consequences and personalities, and valuable insights into the lives of those caught up in its mesh.

Memoir, travel writing, adoption studies, cultural studies, sociology, philosophy, essays, Sweden, South Korea.

What do you do when the world around you is in ruins?