Reviews

Ted Forsström and Åsa Lucander’s Stiven is a charming picture book about a very hungry cat.

In The Organist’s Daughter, Anneli Fichtelius brings to life Swedish-speaking Estonia, lost since the second world war. Set in the 1870s, it is the first novel in a trilogy.

Finland, 1942. Residents returning to the evacuated town of Hanko begin to rebuild their lives, their relationships and the hometown they love in a time of war. Karin Collin’s Where My Heart Is is the last part of a trilogy on Hanko during WW2.

Agitating, gossiping and saving the children: A group of exceptional women journalists emerge from relative obscurity in Fatima Bremmer’s The Pioneers.

A pearl from deep in the ocean turns into the moon in this bewitching picture book by Klara Bartilsson.

In his book Just Don’t, Johan Anderberg puts forward the argument of biding one’s time in the crucial moments.

Influencers, consumer culture and Meghan Markle writing positive messages on bananas: Liv Strömquist’s graphic novel The Pythia Talks takes on wellness culture and our fear of death.

In The Smuggler’s Treasure, a young boy visits his grandma on an island in the archipelago and discovers a 100-year-old smuggling mystery that he needs to solve before criminals do.

The story of one of the Little Rock Nine, Gloria. In the Shadow of Oppression is co-authored by Gloria Ray Karlmark and Elisabeth Åsbrink.

In You Can Escape a Crazy Man But Not Hide From a Society – 10 Years after Utøya, Ali Esbati documents his first-hand experiences of the mass shooting on the Norwegian island of Utøya, and the ominous political and cultural atmosphere that pervaded before and after it.

Mats Jonsson's Stina's joik is a moving YA graphic novel about a Sámi woman who used her extreme height to earn money for her family, while never fully living her own life.

How We Met Your Mother by Kaj Korkea-aho is memoir about a gay male couple and their desire to have a child.

In To the Trees Ella-Maria Nutti explores the importance of language and culture to a sense of self and a feeling of belonging.

In An Endlessly Long Spring, translator Lida Starodubtseva proves her mettle on a different side of the creative process.

While the War Is Ongoing There Is No Reconciliation is a collection of articles published in Sweden and Finland over the past two years by Anna-Lena Laurén, Russian correspondent of sixteen years.

Karolina Ramqvist’s The First Book weaves through different tenses and times, interlacing stories like sections of a long braid. There are many lenses through which one could read it, and Ramqvist never sticks to just one.

Together since childhood, it is no longer possible for Melvin and his friends to take their bonds for granted, nor assume what those bonds mean for each other anymore in Mikael Berglund’s novel Slush.

Catgirl and Other Stories is a new collection of graphic short stories by Anneli Furmark that brings together evocative illustrations and melancholic humour.