Reviews

Outsiders, creativity, challenging boundaries, and finding one’s identity.

A hybrid text combining prose poem, journal, autobiography and travelogue ... ‘words en route’.

Greek has given us many words: democracy, philosophy, logic and poetry. Since the collapse of the country’s economy however, a newer, unhappier vocabulary has sprung up associated with Greece: words like troika, corruption, austerity.

Sara is a believer: she believes passionately in the power of books.

Nordenhök writes with a very sensual and poetic pen that reveals layer after layer of what went on in a family living in pre-war Indonesia.

This trilogy about Siri, her family and friends provide both exciting reading and critical perspectives on key problems in society today.

Uusma has written a non-fiction text, incorporated some of her own life into it, and given it the form of a thriller.

Bodström has an acute understanding of the war of attrition fought between politicians and the media.

These diary-like collections are distilled versions of her long-running blog and, like the blog, they are illustrated, mainly with her own often quirky and slightly blurred photographs.

A fascinating blend of fiction and historical fact embracing classicist aesthetics, rumbustious lowlife and Enlightenment political thought, it draws the reader into an enthralling world of intellectual hedonism.

The theme of social class, which has emerged so strongly in works by Susanna Alakoski and Eija Hetekivi-Ohlsson, is to the fore in Olsson’s novel, too.

What’s most important: to remember correctly or to find the correct words?

Lindqvist has again produced a history which has drawn on scholarship and excellent narrative technique to portray a past era vividly.

The plot interweaves fact and fiction and introduces a motley crew of real-life characters – including King Carl XVI Gustaf and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt – into the narrative.

Descending to a basement toilet, he finds the exit locked and wanders subterranean corridors to emerge on the street in a Lund city and university of the 1920s.

Kadefors’s portrait of a girl outsider in baggy clothes and hoodies, who manages to become a blog fashion icon, raises questions about who has the authority to write about young people.

The journalist Martin Schibbye and the photographer Johan Persson set off from Sweden to investigate the activities of the Swedish company Lundin Oil.

Storytelling is an important motif in this book, which has elements of a fairy tale itself.