Reviews

The historical novel – often long, usually impressively researched – is very much alive.

‘The night before Ulla-Maj Holm, retired school director and former Member of the Finnish Parliament for the Swedish People’s Party in the constituency of Vaasa north, vanished without trace from the Norrvalla Rehab Centre, she dreamed about the first night of a play that never took place’.

The grass smells faintly of blood.

Thunander lets the people she meets speak for themselves – much of the text is directly quoted dialogue.

Sem-Sandberg is a masterly analyst who has chosen to present his observations in fiction rather than in historical works.

A modern-day, working-class Swedish Miss Marple.

This book will appeal to those looking for an unusual retelling of a world classic, this time by two children playing ‘Let’s Pretend’.

When Emilia finally ‘comes home’, little of what she remembers still stands in the new Euro-Poland. What was that past of hers – a dream?

Beckomberga Hospital was once Europe’s largest mental institution.

Her Stockholm is cold, exposed and lonely, and her protagonist and narrator more often than not wanders the streets alone, rejected by both lovers and society.

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.

Åkerman’s book opens up new perspectives on the queen who had admired Alexander the Great since she was a child, who refused to marry, and who sought to develop intellectual networks abroad.

Socially aware and experimentally inclined.

Stockholm medical academia provides a neat setting for this sensitive, educated, music-loving female detective.

The compelling strangeness of a world virtually humming with suppressed secrets and on the brink of collapse.

A singular collection of poetry in which the present is conveyed through the presence of the past.