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.

This is a novel that plays with the genre that has brought Swedish writing international attention, with the crime writer as protagonist, perpetrator and potential victim.

Highly conceptual poetry which goes much deeper than mere experimentation.

Tichý carries his prose like a great central European writer of the 20th century.

Svensson creates neologisms and plays with nursery rhymes, children’s stories, pirate lore, and other intertextual references, making her novel intricate and intriguing.

An ambitious exploration of what it means to be human.

‘The problem is the same everywhere: introducing democracy hurts.’

This linked story collection grabs us with its oddity from story one.

These girls hunt with boundless appetite.

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.

Andersson's book is a call to arms against the sterile, anonymous, uniform and ubiquitous ‘grey boxes’ of Finnish modernism.