Reviews

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

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.

Twelve poems for young readers by Barbro Lindgren, I’d Like to Be a Tree encourages young readers to connect with nature.

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.

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.

William Älgebrink's The House at the End of the Pärl River is a thriller-horror story about a search for blood.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Chop Chop: The Story of Brave Earthling Linda Bondestam tells a complex and appealing story about a good-natured robot.

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

In her latest book, While We’re Living, Nina Björk deep-dives into the waters of existential philosophy. In seven chapters, she discusses authenticity, identity, meaning, trust, love, time, and reality – impressive topics to tackle.

In Stone in Silk, Mikael Niemi describes a Finnish-speaking northern Sweden set in a period far from the egalitarian social democracy we think of today.

In Mirja Unge’s Dog Nights, a young woman returns to her home town after a long absence and finds some disturbing changes.

Åsa Beckman sheds light on the traumatic experiences of children of writers in Culture Child: Growing Up in the Shadow of an Author

A tense account of murder and deceit in remote forest against the backdrop of the pandemic, Johanna Holmström’s Wolf Cub keeps the reader guessing until the end.

Klarna is a trading success of our times, and part of a truly radical change, from analogue to digital, in the way we do trade. As Jonas Malmborg points out in The Big Credit Party: nowadays, hardly any financial transactions take place without digital mediation.

Fredrik Sonck’s Freja and the Snake is a clever picture book about the first time a child sees that her parents can make mistakes.

Wonder, Anna Ahlund’s older middle grade novel, is about a group of friends who each receive a mysterious postcard and the wonder this brings about.

Written in innocent yet poetic prose, Pär Hansson’s debut novel The Spider Birch reminds us of what it is like to be a child, in all its wonder and cruelty. At the same time, it leaves the reader with a disconcerting longing for closure. But maybe that is exactly what it means to be an adult: never managing to truly grasp our childhood, while never being able to let go of it either.

Elin Lucassi's I love Astrid Lindgren is a moving graphic novel about postpartum psychosis.

In Queen Margaret's Dream Erik Petersson brings the complexity of gaining and holding on to power in the medieval era to life through the personality of Queen Margaret, and her achievement of uniting the crowns of Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 1397.

What do you do when a very sad, but very big monster turns up at the door? In To Comfort a Monster, Jesper Cederstrand and Clara Dackenberg answer this question.

In The Great Artist, Emmy Abrahamson and Hanna Jedvik’s first of a planned series of novels together, we meet one of the most unlikely double acts in contemporary crime fiction who end up a qualified success.

Surrounded by heat in a tremulous world, India and Kallas answer an invitation from Kallas’ childhood best friend to leave summer in the city behind and visit her by the sea. Her garden house is an oasis, but in Red Sun nowhere is without a sense of unease.

Cherry trees in blossom, a dead cat, the Pleiades and mourning. In When I Was Snow Ingela Strandberg’s poetry takes us on a journey through nature where death and life go hand in hand.

Charlotte Al-Khalili’s When Everything Is Over is a high-suspense novel with a focus on domestic violence and an unusual heroine.

Johan Hilton’s ‘story’ of Benny Fredriksson’s life and death is more than an engaging memoir of great contemporary theatre manager – it is also a forensic analysis of the process by which a respectable social media campaign, part of the international #MeToo movement, became an apparatus of persecution.

Set in a bleak dystopian future, Nils Lundkvist’s debut The History of the Wilderness: The Cube is a suspenseful chapter book that can be devoured in one or two sittings.

How to mourn a death that was never talked about, without even a grave to visit? In Intertwining, Pia Mariana Raattamaa Visén articulates how loss affects three subsequent generations.

How do you know if the person you have feelings for feels the same about you? Johan Ehn’s children’s book 12 Days of Summer navigates the unsafe waters of a fragile and intense first love.

Karl Kofi Ahlqvist’s Restless Nights is a quietly powerful debut. The novel follows a man in his early twenties as he tries to make ends meet, flitting between part-time work and dating older women for money.

In Hope and Destiny, set in a Sweden recovering from the ravages of the Black Death, a family of nobles attempts to wrest back control of their country. But fraught internal relations, coupled with the son’s unorthodox nature, end with the family divided against itself.

What is evil, and how does it relate to who we are? Is the desert the setting of Sami Said's thematically heavy, yet lyrically light novel, or is it the emotional world itself? There is life in every corner, but is the desert chiefly pregnant with miracles, or evil?

With its appealingly coloured tales of a group of twenty-something friends that shun strict realism for a more psychological take, Cecilia Vårhed’s graphic novel Empty Boasting has fun with the genre.

Elisabeth Åsbrink's My Big, Beautiful Hatred portrays a gifted writer torn apart by the conflicting demands that late nineteenth-century society placed on female authors and intellectuals.

The phrase: ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’, can be used to describe many works of fiction and non-fiction written on the subject of popular music in the last 60 or so years. Marcus Berggren’s book, A Good Place in the Brain, is certainly one of these, and to which can be added the phrase, ‘with a wry sense of humour.’

In Annika Norlin’s debut novel The Ant Hill, An alternative lifestyle brings rewards and challenges for a group of people who reject mainstream society.

Alma Thörn’s children’s book Wednesdays at the Swimming Pool is a lavishly illustrated and irresistibly empathetic tale of what it feels like to struggle with anxiety.

Karin Nordin Stensö's The Tender Mother is a graphic memoir about becoming a mother and struggling with the reality of it, as compared to the way it is depicted in art.

In Sissy, Jonas Gardell writes another collective literary testimony from Stockholm’s gay community. This time, the sissies – said to be the most despised even by the gay community – take centre stage.

Does honesty matter? In Soul’s Telegraph, Amanda Svensson explores the painful legacy of a mother who can’t – or won’t – tell the truth.

In his award-winning poetry collection, Onkalo, Victor von Hellens depicts the solitary existence of an isolated individual in a post-apocalyptic Finland.

Heaven is Near is an exploration of the art, love and enduring legacies of Swedish writer Stig Dagerman and actress Anita Björk, written by their daughter, Lo Dagerman

If you partake in something you know is wrong and later write about it, can any value be extracted from the prose? Or is it simply wrong? August Prize-nominated Morality by Lyra Ekström Lindbäck unfolds like a thesis centred on this and other philosophical questions.

Whatever happened to memory in the former dictatorships of Central Europe? Shots in Slovakia: A Central European Tragedy highlights the shortcomings in remembrance culture that continue to hold these societies back.

Murder in academia: The Hawk Sings of Death is a literary crime novel set at Uppsala University by an author based there.

A curator’s eye tour of an art museum, The Maintenance Labyrinth, Ida Börjel’s dialogue in poem form is narrated with an eye for the details of objects and their conservation, as well as subtle humour.

Edith Hammar's Portal is a queer graphic novel about finding community and being seen.

Enforcers of unfree labour are victims and perpetrators: in The Slavedriver, Anders Teglund combines reportage and historical essays to examine that grim paradox.

Acclaimed author Jonas Hassen Khemiri returns with The Sisters, a novel that balances expertly on the line between past and present, Sweden and America, reality and fiction.

Under the piercing, watchful eye of the main character Anne in Carolina Ringskog Ferrada-Noli’s wildly entertaining and, at the same time, crushing novel It Is Chronic, the ways of today’s (western) world are picked apart and observed through the lens of pain.

What would you do if you found a beating beetroot heart in the basement? Micaela Favilla’s The Heart in the Cellar offers one possibility.

The People of Strömsö by Rosanna Fellman is a prose-poetry panorama of twenty-first century life in Finland.

In Annika Sandelin’s My Flying Grandma, Joel’s parents are off on a trip and have left him behind with a grandma he scarcely knows and has no desire to get to know either. She’s not a good cook, an engaged grandparent, a friend to anyone or a particularly interesting person. Or is she?

The Skeleton is a picture book about a boy who breaks his arm and learns to conquer his fear of his skeleton.

Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo's short, fragmented gem of a novel in which a woman ponders her impossible relationship with a married man, trying to figure out what to do with a love that is not supposed to exist. In a lovely poetic prose that glimmers with dark humour she tries to write her way back to inner strength and her own true self.

In Mia Franck's Gallantry, four young friends find a novel way around some of the restrictions faced by women in Helsinki in 1912.

In Ulla Donner’s The Natural Comedy a lost leaf, a jilted mushroom and a senile forest deity come together for an unusual road trip through a destroyed forest in a visually stunning, multi-layered tale of environmental destruction that references Dante’s Divine Comedy.

A Giraffe’s Heart is Unbelievably Large is a gorgeous, moving middle-grade adventure about acceptance and belonging.

Have you ever thought that some important events in world history might have been influenced by circumstances other than just plain politics? Well, in his book The Weather that Changed the World, Marcus Rosenlund comes up with another reason – the weather!

Dusk 41, number nine in Kjell Westö’s group of novels reflecting twentieth-century Finnish history, follows a handful of people ‘like you and me’ who lead their lives as best they can while their country is at war and, after a brief, anxious peace, is drawn into an even bigger war.

A classic dystopia, The Land of Sleep is simultaneously a pandemic and a postbellum novel, where human life nosedives amidst a potent mix of societal collapse and rampant infectious disease. For sex worker Nolan, there appears to be no possible change on the horizon — until he meets the political wunderkind Lum and is thrown right into the eye of the storm.

Set in quiet Ostrobothnia, Nilla Kjellsdotter’s The Girl in the Stone Park proves that horror – including the worst kind imaginable – can lurk anywhere.

Mao’s Hibiscus is a story of a decades’ long friendship between former Maoists, cemented by the obligation to look after a suitcase of money. They eventually invest the money, but their investment has fatal consequences, and everything points to the involvement of the Russian secret services.

In Maria Hellbom’s many-layered, enchanting children’s fantasy novels, two pre-teen protagonists team up with age-old, local mythical creatures and animals in order to save their rural community, its people, forests and animals from fire and exploitation.

This picture book by Annica Hedin takes an innovative approach to exploring knotty moral issues for very young children, aged 3-6 years. It begins with a question – what do we do in secret which we know is wrong, and what happens if somebody notices?

Best known for her poetry, Edith Södergran (1892 – 1923) also left a substantial body of photography. In Another Edith, award-winning book designer Nina Ulmaja analyses some of these photos and links them to Södergran’s biography – and her own.

Stylistically breathtaking, Maxim Grigoriev’s The Rain is a hypnotic ode to a city being hollowed by gentrification, as told through the fragmented conversations of a young group of residents.

Sara Gordan’s The Night was received with unanimous, overwhelmingly warm praise for her unique style of novelistic autobiography that focuses on a troubled, loving parenthood.

A Crate of Oranges tells the moving real-life story of a Jewish boy and his father forced by persecution to emigrate from Communist Poland.

Johanna Frid´s novel Harald’s Mother charts a difficult relationship between a mother and her daughter-in-law. It is a funny but at the same time deeply poignant take on love, family and relationships. A perfect read for book club discussions.

In Lotta Geffenblad’s life-affirming and humorous picturebooks about the lovably odd couple Tora and Tytte, size does not matter if you care for one another. Together the couple explores everyday chores with unexpected, hilarious results and a deep sense of the small pleasures of everyday life.

An excellent whodunnit as well as a sharp social and psychological drama about peoples’ lives, loves and unavoidable tragedies, The Living and the Dead shows Christoffer Carlsson on home ground in Halland.

Carl Henrik Carlsson's text is a comprehensive and highly readable study of Jewish history in Sweden from the arrival of Aaron Isaac in Ystad in 1774 to the present day.

Luleå, northern Sweden, 1999. Summer is just beginning, and for three boys on the edge of teenagerdom, long months of freedom beckon. In Mikael Yvesand's Hang City adventure is always round the corner – and sometimes right under your nose. If you can see that far.

In Maria Hellbom’s many-layered, enchanting children’s fantasy novels, two pre-teen protagonists team up with age-old, local mythical creatures and animals in order to save their rural community, its people, forests and animals from fire and exploitation.

In Half of Malmö’s Men Have Dumped Me, Amanda Romare takes the reader on a Mr Toad’s wild ride of sex, laughs and disappointment.

In They’re Taking Everything Away from Me, An intense YA novel set in Northern Sweden, Linda Jones describes Frida, a fifteen-year-old coming of age in a community that is falling apart.

In Lotta Geffenblad’s life-affirming and humorous picturebooks about the lovably odd couple Tora and Tytte, size does not matter if you care for one another. Together the couple explores everyday chores with unexpected, hilarious results and a deep sense of the small pleasures of everyday life.

The Story of Bodri is a simple introduction to the Holocaust for young children, told from the perspective of a girl and her beloved dog.

Nominated for 2023 Nordic Council Literature Prize, A Book For Nobody surprises and delights thanks to Isabella Nilsson’s playful approach to writing about difficult topics.

Inger Edelfeldt's Scheherazade-like sequence for today’s fantasy fans weaves an unsettling tale of suppression of freedom in multiple worlds and provides a pithy commentary on the mechanics of storytelling in the process.

An in-depth and readable analysis of Russia and its leadership in the post-Soviet era, The Fallen Empire looks at the developments, events and rhetorical manoeuvres that led the country where it is today.

A band of orphans fights for survival – and against each other – in The Bear Hunter’s Daughters, Anneli Jordahl’s feminist retelling of Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers. While the sisters prove that women can do everything men can do, do they really want to?

You Are Not My Mother and If You Meet a Bear, two new picture books illustrated by Linda Bondestam, have very different narratives and styles, but both reveal an artist at the height of her powers.

Punishment depicts life in a harsh 1950s boarding school for the children of Sámi reindeer herders, and how those children grapple with their trauma thirty years on.

A moving new graphic memoir about tracing a family lost through the Holocaust, Remember Us To Life grapples not only with the war itself, but also its impact on younger generations and contemporary perspectives on minorities and outsiderness.

Johannes Anyuru is a master of portraying contemporary Western European city life with poetic tenderness. With his latest novel, he takes us to a working-class immigrant neighbourhood in Antwerp, where a mother grapples with the dissolving boundaries of the life she has created for her son.

Ulla-Lena Lundberg and Negar Naseh: two women writers from different generations and cultural backgrounds, with voices as distinctive as the settings of their narratives. Their novels Light and Flame and A Handful of Wind offer spell-binding insights into the landscapes of their minds.

Dream Baby Dream by Jenny Tunedal is a tour de force attempt to come to grips with the overwhelming oppression of grief, and it has been lauded by critics across the board in Sweden.

A diverse collection of essays and other texts by the former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, The Silk Cathedral and Other Texts delves into everything from photography to Svetlana Alexievich to Flaubert, always with a keen eye on style.

Yani is a coming of age novel dealing with friendship, love, grief, belonging and what to do when your best friend is threatened with deportation.

You Are Not My Mother and If You Meet a Bear, two new picture books illustrated by Linda Bondestam, have very different narratives and styles, but both reveal an artist at the height of her powers.

A green-fingered resting actress and her poker-playing nephew solve crimes in the Swedish countryside in Carin Hjulström’s cozy crime novel Just a Small Murder.

Anna Charlotta Gunnarson follows her critically acclaimed and August Prize-nominated book Pop Rhymes with Politics with The Women that Shaped Pop Music History, in which she uncovers women who have played an integral part in the development of the popular music industry.

In Nina Hemmingsson’s Room Without Title, we follow a woman who is trying to untangle an age-old conundrum: how did she end up in a bad relationship, and why can’t she leave?

Ulla-Lena Lundberg and Negar Naseh: two women writers from different generations and cultural backgrounds, with voices as distinctive as the settings of their narratives. Their novels Light and Flame and A Handful of Wind offer spell-binding insights into the landscapes of their minds.

Tuva Korsström’s latest work is an autobiographical essay that expands into a double biography of her parents.

In Jonas Gren's The Chromosome Park, Ella navigates genetic illness and loss in a world where reflective cloth covers the ground in an attempt to reflect the sun's warmth back into space, and a thousand small, organic volcanoes are utilised to build a protective layer to shield Earth.

A farm in western Finland is passed down through four hundred years of the same family. Inherited Land explores family bonds and traditions, as well as individual personalities and experiences, of generations of the extended Nevabacka family.

Hackers, oil, murders and a crime-writer-turned-investigator all meet in The Writing in the Water, a suspense novel by horror-writer-turned-crime-writer John Ajvide Lindqvist.

Monsters from Nordic mythology and changelings disguised as human teenagers are loose on the streets of modern-day Stockholm in Changelings 1 – The Army of Orphans.

In Letters to Men, comedian, actress, and author Bianca Kronlöf addresses the men in her own peer group to ask for their loyalty, help and commitment to the feminist struggle for gender equality.

Graphic novelist Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom’s first work, Palimpsest, was an exploration of her own adoption from Korea to Sweden. In Excavated Earth, a moving, painful work, she continues her artistry and advocacy by analysing adoptions – or, more accurately, baby thefts – from Chile to Sweden.

A closer look at the development of strikes that homes in on different aspects of industrial conflict, Jesper Hamark’s Strike. From Dark Satanic Mills to the Gig Economy offers some interesting ideas on the trade unionism and capitalism of today.

A heinous criminal - or criminals - stalk the alleys, passages, churches and walls of medieval Visby. No one is safe until Thierry of Liège doggedly gets to the truth in Dick Harrison’s latest crime fiction.

A loosely autobiographical tale of touring musicians, anxiety, suicide and drug use, narrated in nail polish colours, Moa Romanova’s Off the Rails is an image-driven, witty and moving account of friendship.

Set in the South of France and inspired by cinema, Nina Wähä’s novel Babetta is a mysterious story of friendship in which nothing is as it seems.

Have you ever dreamt of spending your summers on a remote Swedish island? Well, that’s exactly what the main character in Oskar Kroon’s children’s novel Waiting for the Wind gets to do in this heart-warming tale about freedom, sadness, loneliness, love, death, friendship and the sea.

Åke Smedberg, one of Sweden’s best-loved contemporary writers, presents a very Swedish genre: nature lyricism running like a red thread through a narrative, illuminated by bittersweet reminiscence.

Manda and her best friend Malin are inseparable. In We'll just ride past, it's them against their small-town world... or not so much ‘against’ but outside it, cycling round the periphery of anything thrilling, as the end of the school year looms and with it the end of their compulsory education.

Kayo Mpoyi's Kitoko (meaning ‘beautiful’) is the touching story of how a little girl helps her father find hope again.

Lucid Dreams: A User’s Manual is a collection of stories spanning suburbia, science fiction, loneliness, violence and sheer horror from Johanna Holmström, a past master of uncomfortable writing.

The most brilliant and beautiful woman you never saw in the best debut you’ve ever read? Collected Works braids three characters into an unforgettable story.

Saturated with the sights, sounds and tastes of Ermoupoli and loaded with simmering tensions, Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity is a suggestive exploration of desire, power, and the endless shifts of memory.

The Twin Sisters is a captivating story about closeness, distance and exclusion, following the life of two young girls adopted from a Thai orphanage by a Swedish couple.

The voices of writers and poets from across the Sámi lands of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia ring out with the clarity of reindeer bells in Sápmi from the Inside: Testimonies from Stolen Land.

In Seluah Alsaati’s Not Your Baby we meet Samira: star football player and burgeoning rapper, perhaps the next Cardi B. She knows who her friends are, and what she wants from a guy – three simple demands, nothing complicated. Then she meets Nabil, and her whole world is turned upside down ... and not totally for the better.

‘The absurd is a reality, he thought, forming a snowball between his hands, there’s no need to twist the text to find it, it’s there all the time.’ Year of the Black Moon, a delightful but troubling existential detective novel, follows a disillusioned scholar on an epic quest for clues and meaning when his normal life is derailed by concussion.

'Published author looking to buy an apartment in south Helsinki. Offer me a good price, and I’ll write you a book!’ So begins The Red Room, a novel about dominance, submission, manipulation, and the darker side of human relationships that unfortunately fails to fulfil its potential.

Margit Silberstein’s Children of the Holocaust is an important story to tell in today’s transcultural Sweden, as the discussion of migrant/postmigrant identity is an increasingly relevant topic in the political and cultural discourse.

An account of a remarkable court case against the most unlikely of criminal gangs – private home care providers – is followed by well-informed commentary, case histories and interviews in The Home Care Mafia. Finally, a piece of journalistic dynamite: a unique list, naming and shaming assorted provider organisations and local authorities.

An unconventionally told story of childhood in which photography and aesthetics play a major part, Shade and Breeze is an elusive but absorbing debut novel.

In In the Hall of Mirrors, Liv Strömquist asks where our obsession with appearance came from, and whether we should try to change the situation.

The Bridge Builders begins the tale of one family’s journey from a tiny village near Bergen in the late 1800s through the 1900s and into the new millennium.

The multi-talented Jonas Karlsson is back with New People in the Wrong Order, a new collection of short stories that steps away from the surrealism he is renowned for, but not the unpredictability.

Spoiler alert! This book will alter your perceptions of fake news, cancel culture and ‘experts.’ Olof Hallonsten’s The Critical Conscience of Modernity: A social science that is useful is both timely and necessary. Hallonsten tackles critics of social sciences head on to reject many of their criticisms.

In She Doesn’t Remember, a writer, psychologist and literary translator is inspired to write a moving, timely account of his mother’s dementia that will resonate with many readers outside Sweden.

A commentary on the reception of refugees in Sweden, told through the eyes of a young woman working with unaccompanied minors, The Afghan Sons is an award-winning novel with a sense of connection.

The Mystery of Helmersbruk Manor is a spooky but heart-warming Christmas mystery for middle-grade readers.

Hidden Gods: About Everything That Doesn’t Get Lost in a Translation explores the art of literary translation down the centuries with a delectably dry wit.

Disaster strikes in a small seaside community, bonding families and signalling the beginning of a succession of landmark events in their lives. In Nikky's Book Lidbeck explores the ways people deal with adversity, and its effects on friendships and relationships.

Fine art meets organised crime in Dawn. False., a gripping tale focusing on two female artists.

White Melancholy: An Analysis of a Nation in Crisis takes a timely look at Sweden’s shift from ethnic homogeneity to the more diverse society we see today.

In a post-apocalyptic dystopian world of the not-too-distant future, the global order as we know it has collapsed. Nattavaara, a strong example of speculative fiction, explores what it takes to survive in the fictional nation of Nordmark in this new era.

Mats Strandberg’s The Conference sees a whole municipal department running for its life.

A Lonely Place, Kristina Sandberg's eighth book, is a moving, unsparing memoir that explores the period when Sandberg had breast cancer.

Kjell Johansson has been writing insightful stories about people in insecure jobs since long before the lot of the precariat became the trendiest of socio-political topics. Bad People offers gripping insights into the different ways humanity is undermined by social insecurity.

Borderland is a new outing for Aino Trosell’s working-class heroine Siv Dahlin, who is now a postwoman in the remote region of Finnmark, where cuts in services are piling on the pressure and local sensibilities are stirred by both wolf attacks and refugee problems.

The year is 1676, and men and women stand accused of witchcraft and leading others into Satan’s clutches. In Sisela Lindblom's Burn!, one nasty little girl just wants to watch them burn.

In an expansive collection of poetry dealing explicitly with climate change and COVID-19, Malte Persson explores the meaning of time of and beyond humanity. Annihilation, ranging in scope from single poems to a 60-page epic, uses rhyme to impose a sense of order in an increasingly disordered world.

Eija Hetekivi Olsson's The Young Ones We Kill is an at times harrowing mother-daughter story about the consequences of bullying in schools, segregation in the suburbs of Gothenburg, and the love and fear of a mother fighting for her daughter.

Literary critic Rasmus Landström's The Return of Working-Class Literature offers a thorough survey and analysis of a uniquely Swedish publishing tradition that remains largely inaccessible to Anglophone readers.

In Zinat Pirzadeh's gripping true story Butterfly on a leash, over the course of one night in Teheran, a young woman has to make the most important decision of her life. As she waits for dawn to arrive, she thinks about the girl she was.

Mats Jonsson tried to avoid thinking about his Sámi heritage for decades. In When We Were Sámi he realises that he has no choice but to face it and to try to understand where Sámi people fit in Sweden’s history.

In Johan Rundberg's The Night Raven, the merciless winter of 1880, an abandoned newborn and a murder all coincide to push eleven-year-old Mika, an orphan, into exploring her past and solving a mystery in the city of Stockholm.

In Anneli Jordahl's Like the Dogs in Lafayette Park, a Swedish woman obsessed with class-related injustice finds inspiration in the work of the Black Panther movement.

Felicia Stenroth's Movements of the Hand is a taut, strikingly written representation of modern-day exploitation, and a powerful account of the lasting psychological effects of poverty.

In Sara Lundberg's The Day of Forgetting, we see that some days are just like that. You forget what you’re supposed to do or where you’re supposed to go. You might even embarrass yourself by getting things wrong. But don’t worry: we all know what it feels like, and we know it does get better.

Cotton Angel, the first in Susanna Alakoski's epic quartet of novels covering the lives of four generations of working women, vividly depicts a Finnish cotton mill community during the years from Finland’s Civil War to the aftermath of World War II.

As well as being an impeccably researched biography of Märta Tikkanen, a writer who became a Nordic feminist icon, Johanna Holmström’s Ought to shut up – a book about Märta Tikkanen is a dialogue between its author’s 21st-century #metoo feminism and its subject’s feminism of the 1970s and 1980s.

Authoritarianism, rhetoric and protest: scenes from daily life. Anna-Lena Laurén's The Velvet Dictatorship. Resistance and fellow-travellers in today’s Russia. is a highly readable collection of essays on contemporary Russia written by an expert in the area.

A woman is admitted to a secure psychiatric ward claiming she needs to prevent a terrorist attack. In the suspenseful thriller Black sun, Andreas Norman unpicks a white supremacist conspiracy to assassinate the Swedish prime minister.

In Ann-Helén Laestadius' Stolen, a nine-year-old Sámi girl in Arctic Sweden witnesses a hate crime. The trauma will remain with her into young adulthood, when she will battle for the rights of her people – and herself as a future reindeer herder.

After more than two hundred years, Sweden’s national poet finally has a literary biography. In Bellman. The Biography, Carina Burman sketches the life of Carl Michael Bellman in a lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched work.

The Swedish word sorgearbete (mourning) evokes the work we do to process our sorrow. The Singularity, the latest novel from Kurdish-Swedish author Balsam Karam, is the embodiment of such work, and can only be described as lyrical, stirring, and immensely powerful.

The Wolf Run, the latest novel by doyenne of Swedish literature, Kerstin Ekman, resonates with a wisdom deeply rooted in nature.

Travelling between Dimension Homesickness and Dimension Viking Line, Edith Hammar's Homo Line is a graphic novel about dislocation, gentrification, and a lesser-known aspect of wartime Helsinki.

Love is love, even for young reindeer herders: Moa Backe Åstot's Polar Fire is a fresh take on teen romance from the far North.

The most recent work by veteran Swedish author Agneta Pleijel is an engaging novel centring on the real-life meeting in 1969 between Agatha Christie and the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka

In Tullias värld, Kerstin Ekman sets out with grace, inventiveness and often anger to shed light on the hidden lives of the women of Ancient Rome.

'I was born ready to flee.' Elisabeth Åsbrink's genre-bending book portrays three generations of women against the background of Jewish diaspora history.

In the middle-grade novel Lindormars land, Frida Nilsson writes about the need and desire for love and about the difficult choices we sometimes have to make.

They were once a professional couple living a comfortable, middle-class existence in Stockholm. Now Simon is missing and Jenny is searching for him. In Nidamörkur, Fröberg Idling combines a literary style with horror's ability to depict humanity's dark sides.

Överallt och ingenstans is a well-crafted, pleasantly meandering chapter book that brings together the small and big things in life, like cozy Friday nights, lice and complicated friendships.

Nattexpressen is an exciting story for children that opens up opportunities for conversations on a hard topic: how to talk about people who have changed or who are no longer themselves.

Kina Nilsson’s lapidary free verse poems, 77 of which are published in this anthology, are a testimony to the dedication of the hospital staff who have borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Beate Grimsrud's semi-autobiographical final novel - written in Swedish and self-translated into Norwegian - is an astonishing exploration of what it means for an individual life – ‘a giant dot’ – to be erased.

Lucia is 26 when she has a brain haemorrhage and is left with an impaired capacity to remember anything short-term. Josefin Roos' powerful novel draws on her own real-life experience to explore the complex terrain of brain damage.

Ola Larsmo's novel tells the story of Knut Oscar Broady, a Swedish emigrant whose life placed him in the midst of a number of crucial moments in both Swedish and American history.

Journalist Henrik Brandão Jönsson's fourth book is a short history of the Lusophone world that brings together several of the key Portuguese-speaking nations in one volume, providing insight into parts of the world readers may know little to nothing about.

This standalone sequel to Tre apor (Three Monkeys) clearly depicts the tension between staying with one’s own kind versus assimilation, and the challenges that come with belonging to various different groups.

För han var redan dö continues Eva Frantz's skillful series of stand-alone crime novels blending police procedurals with elements of noir, set against a backdrop of the rugged Finnish coast.

The work of Gösta Ågren holds a special place in Finland-Swedish – and Swedish and Finnish – literature. This collection brings together many of his works from the past 60 years.

Bestselling author Majgull Axelsson's new novel, about "a mother who isn't a mother", runs the gamut from thriller to romance and readily retains the reader’s attention throughout.

Ulrika Knutson's fascinating, vibrant biographical narrative explores the life of Elin Wägner, one of Sweden's most important writers of the early 1900s.

Toninho de Lima was plucked from poverty in Rio to play one of the street children in Swedish director Arne Sucksdorff’s award-winning 1965 film My Home is Copacabana. His daughter, journalist and editor Anna de Lima Fagerlind, tells the story of his journey.

An impressive novel by Sami Said that entertains, provokes and moves in equal measure.

In her remarkable book, Elin Anna Labba gives multiple voices to those dispossessed during the forced displacement of Sámi reindeer herders in the 1920s and 1930s.

Adrian Perera's first novel is a claustrophobic story in four languages and plays with the reader’s assumptions from the word go.

Pooneh Rohi's melancholy, haunting novel affords a penetrating insight into what it means to have a composite identity formed by different, conflicting cultures, and how that condition can affect one’s life choices.

Sara Stridsberg's moving book for children echoes her award-winning adult novel, The Gravity of Love, and is gorgeously illustrated by Sara Lundberg.

A love triangle between three people and three Scandinavian capitals is the subject of Johanna Frid's debut novel.

Journalist Helena Trus writes about her grandmother’s experiences during the Holocaust – a reflection on the trauma of persecution and war through the generations.

Everyone carries misery with them. In her debut YA novel stand-up comedian Melody Farshin uses snappy imagery and inventive metaphor to make this book far from miserable.

Linnea Axelsson’s prize-winning epic poem told from multiple perspectives involving two different families over the course of a century.

Kolbjörn Guwallius’s debut novel is a timely tale that takes us into the world of hate sites and alternative media, set against the backdrop of the 2018 Swedish election.

Author Svab and illustrator Bergebo explore the bewilderment and disorientation of life as a refugee from the perspective of five-year-old Hala.

In Broderier, Burcu Sahin creates an uncompromising verbal tapestry that is both a record of her personal experience and memory but also a shared testimony.

In this poetry collection Adrian Perera addresses structural racism and hegemonic whiteness, combining the power of poetry with the realism of a narrative.

Kayo Mpoyi's debut novel is the story of family trauma and its impact through the ages, as seen through the eyes of Adi, a six-year-old diplomat’s daughter from Zaire.

Patrik Lundberg's riveting memoir is a meditation on belonging, exclusion, and the longing for community, connection, and culture.

Frostenson’s poems are still personal, though they’ve never been private.

Andrea Lundgren explores the borderlands of the human and natural worlds to create a northern magical realism with a dark, earthy undertow.

This first novel by Elin Willows is a vivid portrait of an anti-heroine.

‘To reclaim the word “spinster” is not in any way dangerous, destructive or pitiable – quite the reverse. […] All I am doing when I call myself a spinster is acknowledging my own story.

A graphic novel for young adults by Jessica Bab Bonde and Peter Bergting tells the stories of six survivors of the Holocaust. 'This book is arguably more necessary and urgent now than at any time in recent years.'

Boy meets girl at a dance school. Boy becomes a prominent scientist, girl becomes one of the first women to gain a doctorate in chemistry. Who is the genius from Breslau in Lena Einhorn's latest novel?

Impersonating a French journalist in order to meet the Rolling Stones, amorous interludes with older girls, and the endless search for jeans – even if cobbled together from heavy-duty sailcloth – these were all part of Maciej’s teenage years behind the Iron Curtain.

In his sixth novel Gunnar Ardelius returns to key issues facing young Swedes in the modern world.

With Maresi Red Mantle Maria Turtschaninoff confirms her status as an internationally renowned author of fantasy.

It is not often that an author successfully unleashes a riot of issues within a story which, far from turning the reader off, locks them into an uncomfortable embrace, steering them head-first into a volatile quest of trouble and turmoil. This is faultlessly accomplished by Joel Mauricio Isabel Ortiz in this debut novel.

National values always have a geographical and historical context: there is no immutable core of ‘Swedishness’, but a series of changing conceptions and expressions reacting to outside factors. This study examines how these key expressions have influenced Sweden’s development.

Neoscandia is a dystopia set in the future. This graphic novel by Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo and Catherine Anyango Grünewald is a page-turner that merits multiple re-readings and translation.

A haunted school, a mystery from the past and two classmates a world apart, in this acclaimed novel from Sara B. Elfgren

Investigative journalism at this level of intelligence and personal engagement is always more worthwhile than most other sources of ‘news’.

The first in a new fantasy quartet by award-winning Finland-Swedish author Karin Erlandsson.

This biography by Jens Liljestrand places the author Vilhelm Moberg in his historical and cultural context and demonstrates the ways in which he was often determinedly and independently at odds with his times.

The reader is struck by the sheer volume of Bergman’s arbetsböcker or workbooks, the A5 spiral blocks in which he wrote drafts: some sixty of them dating from 1938 to 2001 are preserved.

Duraid Al-Khamisi tells the powerful account of Middle Eastern current affairs in the language of an oriental storyteller.

‘If I could say what my body has in for it today what they do with it. I have no words for it the hands are just there and the pokes thumps pinches every day they’re there.’

Kristina Appelqvist has been described as the queen of a type of whodunnit in which the various pieces of the puzzle are carefully crafted and assembled as the novel progresses.

With her feminist dystopia, Karam joins acclaimed authors such as Johannes Anyuru and Jonas Hassen Khemiri in carving out space for a new speculative fiction emanating from Sweden – one that renews the genre by foregrounding questions of diversity and race in a place so often idealised as a social utopia. ​

A simmering portrait of a soured sibling relationship, and a richly layered contemplation of memory and the imprints left by childhood trauma.

Nicolas de Condorcet, mathematician, philosopher and a member of the first government formed during the French Revolution, championed the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual and religious liberty, rationality, and increased economic freedom.

In a powerful story of loss, Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde asks the difficult questions.

Just how much is likely to have changed between two people who have had no contact with each other for twenty years? Why would one of them suddenly arrive on the other’s doorstep after such an absence anyway?

Far from being a typical whodunnit, the novel explores the buying of sex – illegal in Sweden – from three very different angles.

In Hemmet, a horror novel set in a care home, Mats Strandberg sidesteps clichés to produce a haunting tale of dementia and the greatest fear of all; losing control of ourselves.

Markus Heilig, a psychiatrist turned neuroscientist, has set himself an ambitious project: to explain sex differences in brain structure and function and to show what happens in brains – not just the human one – at different stages of development.

The boy is not her son, and she calls him ‘my boy’ because ‘she took him’ and ‘because he was in my power’.

‘Even during lunch the women and men sit in different sections of the restaurant, with screens between them. It is considered ugly for a woman to open her mouth in public. And that is not only to eat, but also to speak.’

A collection of six interconnected short stories by Danny Wattin. Sharp and entertaining.

It rings true on so many levels, and women especially will relate very personally to this intimate story of the painful transition from girlhood to womanhood. ​

Hannah Lutz's Wild Boar questions ‘[...] which species, which animals and which people are welcome where? And who decides that?’

The colours may be black and white, but Mattson shows us in beautifully well-weighed language that life seldom is.

Mannerheim’s story is the story of Finland and, as well as being an account of one man’s character and career, the book makes an accessible and engaging introduction to Finland’s twentieth-century history.

‘Always the same question when it comes to people. Whose will was stronger?’

A skilled wordsmith and nature writer, Niemi juxtaposes lyrical pastoral beauty with the grotesque and the hideous. He is able to enchant, lull and repulse in equal measure. This is writing that will make you think.

But we are pulled back from the brink: what if the notion of humanity being in charge is, after all, an enabling, hopeful story to tell ourselves?

‘Holy forests, / where every tree within itself / bears a thousand icons, which were not painted by human hand. / See, a vast forest of icons!’

The book’s strength lies in the interplay between emotions and environment, and the way that is expressed, with the island’s song as the theme tune: ‘the song tonight is so strong I feel as if I could catch it in my hands.’

When a snowstorm descends on the wedding party, it is so cold the knife won’t cut through the wedding cake and the bubbles freeze in the champagne glasses.

It is surprising to learn that we now readily accept the presence of mallards, swans, cormorants, mandarin ducks, tufted ducks, goldeneye and a host of other species, all of which were wholly unknown in urban or built-up areas a hundred years ago.

Rattle Rustle Walk is a lovely collection of poetry that is just right for young readers and they, like the tree in winter with its leaves falling, will be sad when it is over.

The old school of fairy tales – the ones that make even adults afraid to walk through the woods alone.

Although the refugee crisis was depicted by press and politicians as a crisis in Sweden, Banke’s book is a timely reminder that the asylum seekers are in fact the ones facing a crisis.

‘The real world, the one outside, does not want to take her… She refused to obey. They beat her black and blue at the penitentiary but she still did not do what she was told, and they realised in the end that they would have to kill her or send her to hospital. So it was the hospital.'

In fact, the word ‘opinion’ has no plural in the local language. While Parisian intellectuals have mooted the idea of a prototypical kilogram, the narrator is startled to discover Thule’s equivalent: a ‘standard national Opinion’, protected by a glass dome.

Agnes Lidbeck creates a layered protagonist whose passivity is actually an active choice. The title, which means ‘to comply’, but also ‘to find oneself’, neatly captures these aspects of the protagonist.

Johannes Anyuru's novel, a searing warning about a possible future, frames a strong message in breathtaking prose.

The question that starts the book is ‘What was the worst thing you experienced?’ Her answer is simple: ‘The moment I was separated from my parents.’

Elise Karlsson's third novel is a stylistically chilly, pared-back reflection on the workings of our present-day society.

Peter Sandström's Autumn Apples is a masterpiece of understatement, a brilliantly laconic portrait of the sad vicissitudes of life.

'...the situation is hopeless ... Perhaps its serious nature will nonetheless lead us to something that we might almost be able to call hope.’

Former police officer Anders de la Motte's suspenseful crime novel was nominated Best Swedish Crime Novel Award by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers.

Although The Sulphur-Yellow Sky begins with a crime, it is not about uncovering a mystery. More than that, it asks how complicit are those who watch, who are involved but not involved, who see but do nothing.

Martin Engberg's entertaining misadventure explores the themes of knowledge, failure, identity and the stresses of academia.

'... it illuminates, with heartbreaking clarity, reality as lived by the individuals who fall through the gaps in international treaties and EU conventions'

What do men want? How is it possible to fulfil their desires, based on their dream of what a woman should be? And how can you escape a marriage that is not your own, but your parents’?

The scandal, according to Kärnstrand and Andersson Åkerblom, is that the same problems have dominated the industry for decades and show little sign of changing.

The second installment in Charlotte Cederlund’s Idijärvi trilogy, a magical YA fantasy that follows teenage misfit Áili in her fight to save her Lapland village from the destructive supernatural forces of the evil Borri noaidi.

Ann-Luise Bertell's debut is ‘A pocket-sized emigrant epic’

Anders Roslund & Stefan Thunberg's taut prose and changes in narrative perspective and tempo make for an intricate psychological drama that crackles on every page.

Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo's works span drama and prose, but always with a poetic touch, and In Transit is no exception.

Maja Hagerman’s impressive research and skilful narrative reveal unexpected events in the life of controversial doctor Herman Lundborg and confirm many misgivings about his work and views.

In this first instalment in the Idijärvi Trilogy, Charlotte Cederlund blends Sami mythology with YA fantasy to create a Nordic coming-of-age novel set under the glow of the Northern Lights.

This is futuristic fiction, dealing with a world where nuclear war and its aftermath is the reality but where the potential attacks of tomorrow are even more deadly and frightening – enough to wipe out the entire human race.

Elis Burrau’s first full-length poetry collection is a fragmented but alluring investigation into finding a poetic identity. It’s an opportunity to sample the very latest of young Swedish poetry.

Negra Efendić's book is a personal story of a child's journey from security to a life in a far away land.

In this vividly narrated novel from August-Prize-winning writer Johanna Thydell a teenage girl meets her estranged mother for a bird-watching assignment.

Korta Stycken, a slim volume of short stories, flash fiction and poetry, is a masterclass in style by Johan Bargum, one of Finland’s most renowned contemporary writers.

The exploration of her own past was a driving force behind Elisabeth Åsbrink's selection of people and events from 1947 and gives this book its special atmosphere.

In her trilogy about the teenage Turid, Elisabeth Östnäs gives us a tale of a curious, kind and fiercely intelligent young woman who finds herself questioning elements of the society where her father is king.

To put it in the terms of her particular academic field, we might say she has entered her own Mannerist phase, her life descending into a grotesque caricature of itself.

Sara Lövestam's third novel about Kouplan, a transgender Iranian refugee turned private detective, is a subtle, humorous and immensely enjoyable read.

Charlotta von Zweigbergk's Fattigfällan (The Poverty Trap) is a social case history retold with passionate subjectivity.

Lena Frölander-Ulf's enchanting winter read is a thought-provoking exploration of confronting fears and preconceptions through encounters with whimsical forest folk and a homely troll.

Her novel holds up a distorted mirror and shows them that their writerly approach to women is not without consequence, as if to say ‘Here you are – this is what it looks like from where I’m standing’.

In a novel that alternates between Finland and Cameroon, Sara Razai explores race, class, religion and belonging.

Author Ulf Stark’s and illustrator Linda Bondestam’s illustrated book presents 27 species which no one but their creators has ever seen – in splendid colors and with ingenious rhymes.

An independent prequel to the well-received Maresi, Maria Turtschaninoff's Naondel tells the story of the First Sisters – founders of the Red Abbey.

‘Don’t look for a scapegoat. We all bear the guilt.’

Over a century later, only the nationalities have changed.

There’s a lot of Pollyanna in Billie, but also a bit of Pippi Longstocking.

In Latvia, however, many people are constantly told they are Russians – however long they’ve lived there.

A slow-burning horror story that weaves magic and gore into an otherwise realistic portrayal of a dystopian Gävle.

What do Emily Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe have in common?

It may be difficult to believe that an academic linguist saved Sweden from the temptations of a terrifying Nazi-inspired solution to the economic problems of the 1920s and 30s.

A psychological study of sexual and family relationships which relies for much of its tension on folktale imagery.

Though crimes are definitely committed, this is not a conventional crime novel.

This extremely timely book reminds us why people flee their countries and what happens if we let ignorance and intolerance guide our minds and close our hearts.

If this is all starting to sound like a combination of the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series, mixed with Nordic mythology, and with a large hint of Nordic noir added, then that’s a pretty accurate description.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but there is a carbon neutral one – if we are willing to pay for it.

There are many intertextual references, usually to European philosophers, and black-and-white illustrations of paintings, landscapes, and photographs, in the spirit of the German novelist W.G. Sebald.

Profoundly humane, inviting the young reader to sympathise with the underdog.

Such benign vagueness is probably the best policy for someone who lives under threat, not only from former potentially murderous co-religionists but also assorted security agencies (the Swedish included).

These short stories may simply be too frightening – or perhaps unnerving – for some readers.

Khemiri is known for his ironically self- referential approach to writing.

Not only is the main character a girl, but the novel looks at other aspects of Viking life, particularly religion, literacy and social distinctions.

Young children’s books often feature dragons and princesses, and this one is no exception.

There is delightful period detail in food, dress and pop songs on tangle- prone cassette tapes, but older history is ever present in this sea-facing kingdom that is trying to turn its back on time.

The Katitzi books expose readers to a way of life and to a period of harsh and disturbing stereotyping and discrimination of the Romani people that many may not know much about.

A novel of violence and feelings.

Now Masha, Tolstoy’s favourite child, comes into focus, completing the Russian triptych.

‘How grandiose, eccentric, depressive, suicidal, bizarre, queer or sexually affirmative can a woman be before she is labelled insane?’

Doris is a determined little girl who knows her own mind. And what she wants is to finish the civil engineering project she’s working on in her sandpit, not to go out for afternoon tea – particularly when that means putting on a pink flouncy frock rather than her favourite sailor suit.

A secret concealed in the communal laundry: a tub full of pulsating black goo that craves blood and offers in return irresistible mystical transports.

Maria (Mary to her friends), a 23-year-old architecture student, has just discovered that she is expecting a baby.

That magical, belly-flipping fizz of first love.

This is the kind of book likely to elicit the attention of gatekeepers in the world of YA fiction.

Virdborg’s whole book can be read as a descent into hell.

What remains from Ray Bradbury’s story is an existential ambivalence about the end of a life, and of the novel itself in the face of inevitability.

Who but an artist could better interpret for the rest of us just what it is like to be mentally ill?

Joyful purples and blues dominate the second phase of the journey, the sea crossing, with its gloriously calm starry skies and tranquil moon.

It’s a kind of community rarely portrayed in literature.

Something rotten at the heart of the Finland-Swedish academic and literary establishment.

A carefully made documentary in print: two skilful communicators have joined forces to stimulate readers into learning more about their special subject.

Jessica Schiefauer’s thorough examination of neo-Nazis, hate crime and homoeroticism resists simplification and reminds us of the thin line we all tread when we choose how to treat each other.

At a staff meeting, discussing ways to tackle the persistent issue of shoplifting, a security guard suggests the store deal with the problem by making culprits wear a sign saying ‘I am a thief’.

A particular strength is his description of how someone in a crisis observes small and seemingly unimportant details and clings to them, to protect himself or herself against a greater evil.

As in Alejandro Almenábar’s 2001 film ‘The Others’, the encounters with the dead challenge and unsettle our perception of reality.

Nothing is what it seems in Edenborg’s counterfactual historical romance.

The thriller lives!

Readers will surely ponder these perceptive, thought-provoking essays long afterwards.

A comic book with kidnappings, changelings, fortunes sought and happy homecomings.

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.

Öland: ‘A place where a chilly, salty taste forms a membrane, coating and soothing ever-open wounds which will always struggle to heal’.

There are different ways to write about the Holocaust.

A provocative retelling of Roland Paulsen’s study of Sweden’s Public Employment Service.

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?

She has an understanding of environmental chemistry, mathematics and meteorology – but when it comes to people…

The playfulness thinly veils a more serious message – the lack of status afforded to education and learning in modern society.

A collection of texts that offer possible solutions to apparently insurmountable problems.

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’.

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.

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

Among beauty bags and wine bottles lingers a refreshing attitude of acceptance and hope.

Janson explodes dangerous myths, traces a complicated history and reveals linguistic connections that together were, and are, misused by nationalists and racists to invent a past that suited their political objectives.

It was with good reason that the publisher decided to send a copy of the novel to the leaders of all the Swedish political parties.

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.’

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.

This novel examines the life of Queen Victoria from girlhood to dotage. With one difference: it avoids affairs of state almost entirely, instead devoting a section each to Victoria the girl, the wife and the widow.

The thing about each of the tiny exercises in form, however, is the twisted nature of what emerges.

Egerkrans reminds us just how frightening these creatures once were and seeks to restore a measure of the darkness and terror they possessed in days of yore.

This prose poem turns a mirror on the life of a family, a society, and a human being, and in doing so, makes the reader see the world in a different way.

Kellerman’s self-awareness makes the writing both hysterically funny and sharply intelligent, creating a true picture of life as it is lived now.

The central problem of this novel is Greta Garbo: who do we refer to using that name?

Rådström’s God in this Bible does not rule from on high, but is the Writer of the world and, like all writers, wonders at the way his creation tends to slip out of control.

In her sensitive and engaging language, von Bredow lets her protagonist ponder how appearances affect all our relations. Why does everybody seem so false? How can Andreas’s father cheat and pretend everything is normal at home?

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.

This collection of short stories, awarded the Yle literary prize, comprises a series of portraits set in the 1950s–80s, and many of the characters are Finnish parents still suffering from the after-effects of the wars with Russia, or the next generation reared by such parents.

One of the Nordic region’s most interesting writers of youth fiction.

Fagerholm does not tell a story as much as evoke a world.

The jacket blurb of this spare but unsettling novella pointedly asks: what happened?

An atmospheric novel set on the fictional island of Ör, off Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s native Åland Islands, finds this seasoned and much-lauded writer on top form.

A Gothic celebration of the city in the form of a vampire novel.

The year is 2035...

Each of the 32 poems in this little volume could have an explication devoted to it.

As in the best fantasy novels, the possibility of unknowable forces on the very fringe of our perceivable reality lends depth and tension to Korkea-aho’s novel.

Love and multiculturalism in Finland in the early twenty-first century.

A disquieting feeling sets in ... Anything that is mentioned only casually ends up making you scared.

This novel explores growing up and growing out of childhood certainties, but also the roads to growing into woman amidst the lying and the beauty.

Exceptionally intelligent as well as an intellectual, Donner displays sheer brainpower, which imposes shape, style and interest on the extraordinary miscellanea of his life.

Written in elegantly simple prose, with just the right degree of 1930s formality in the dialogue, the novel successfully fuses history-as-it-happens with the stories of the individuals leading their lives at this particular juncture.

Seldom can we read a spy story of such psychological depth.

The book is very much a meta-novel. Its nine chapters consist of nine parables, corresponding perhaps to the nine leaves torn from the centre of his long-dead father’s poetry notebook. The notebook had recently come into the author’s hands, even though he had long believed that his strongly religious mother had burnt the notebook. To her way of thinking, poetry was sinful. Parables, however, were acceptable.

He has an eye for the little absurdities of life: Helen invites her new work colleague to dinner hoping to pair him up with her friend, but her intentions are thwarted by her own husband getting too enchanted with the guy.

Illustrated in rich swathes of violets, purples and blues, this picture book aims to help young children come to terms with fear of shadows and the dark.

Drawing on the latest research, this volume is a welcome addition to the comparative histories on Scandinavia and the Second World War.

A story of forbidden love and ostracism.

You imagine that, within her, Violencia hosts a continuous never-ending party.

Both prosecutors end up turning to crime to reach their goals.

Arguments as much as works of literature, inviting thought about what illness means to the individual and his/her nearest, as well as presenting, at times obliquely, the issues raised by attempts to organise health care on a massive scale.

A fictional account of the writer and poet Karin Boye’s time in 1930s Berlin.

Personalities as varied as Greta Garbo, Linnaeus and Goethe; a disastrous Nobel Prize ceremony, desperate rides in stolen cars, the snow-covered roads of the Arctic Circle.

The first step of the plan consists of buying a tea plantation in Darjeeling.

A fine piece of investigative authorship.

A shadowy, treacherous epoch, when Europe stood on the brink of war and a dark cloud of fear and intrigue – both personal and political – hung over the continent like an impending plague of locusts.

Söderlind has taken her inspiration from a dark but horrifyingly real chapter in the history of Ångermanland. The plot revolves around Stake Mountain, a hill on which 71 local women, sentenced to death for witchcraft, were beheaded and burnt in the 1670s.

‘Madness’ is not just an idea, but rather the essence of the book.

The quiet underdog with hidden qualities, a loser suddenly finding that he or she can make a difference in a situation where former tormentors now have to rely on him or her.

‘Judaism is a humanity unto itself – as diverse and heterogeneous as all of humanity on our planet.’

She discovers that there is blood on her dress, but she is having her period, so perhaps that is the reason? Still, she hides the dress in her closet. The bodies of her parents are found, and she is arrested.

The butterfly effect of the title is the scientific theory that a single occurrence, no matter how tiny, can change the course of the universe forever.

The influence of English crime fiction on Maria Lang’s novels is obvious: the closed circle of suspects, suspense, and the solution reached through use of the little grey cells with pipe-smoking as inducement to concentration.

A perfect combination for those wanting to get a grip on their own issues with ‘the system’.

This gripping and absorbing account is real Scandinavian crime and deserves the widest possible readership by those who not only take an interest in crime and justice but also enjoy excellent writing and a compelling narrative.

The strength of this first novel set in Lapland is not so much the plot and the whodunit, but rather the account Lars Pettersson weaves around the people eking out a living in this frozen wilderness and their struggle to keep alive local traditions of language and culture.

Where Ovid writes his lament in Latin to and for his friends at the centre of the glittering Empire, Kallifatides writes in his adopted language, holding up a comical mirror to his new fellow-citizens, to whom these letters are really addressed.

The idea of a Swedish disaster story is interesting in itself. The Hollywood output of scare stories is mind-numbing, but something about setting this story in rural Sweden makes it more unsettling than the most imaginative zombie invasion; we expect the Swedish countryside to be safe and uneventful.

Thörn and Persson parody our fascination with crime and play with the conception of what is real by creating a sort of reality fiction.

The Börjlinds’ huge experience as scriptwriters – 25-odd Sjöwall & Wahlöö film and TV series, goodness knows how many Arne Dahl and Henning Mankell ones, and a large number of their own contributions – tells at every turn and twist.

A fusion of fictionalised reportage and interpretative biography.

An anti-hero for our time.

How challenging it is to be caught between two – or more – worlds.

Åsheden examines her material again and publishes her account of events, hoping to lift the curse still hanging over Holmér’s name.

Renowned for his vivid imagery and soul-searching portrayals of contemporary urban life in Sweden, poet and author Johannes Anyuru returns with an intensely personal tale of suffering and determination.

Garbo wants her fellow Swedes to be proud of her for making a film that the whole world admires, and then to let her abdicate from Hollywood stardom.

This is a haunting story in which events are viewed in stream-of-consciousness style through the eyes of a grieving child.

This is not some lurid tale of a serial killer, but an examination of what happens when complex social structures such as the legal system or healthcare fall prey to enthusiastic or misguided professionals. This book bites back at the therapists, police and lawyers who for some reason viewed this patient – Sture Bergwall, also known as Thomas Quick – as a professional battleground.

It makes sense to review these two political thrillers together: both reflect the professional preoccupations of the writers as well as their strongly held and strikingly similar political views, both explore sympathetically the Islamic/Islamist anger that interacts with what is arguably an unlawful Western overreaction, and both are very well informed.

Shines a light on a shamefully ignored chapter of Sweden’s modern history with immeasurable sorrow and intense anger – but also with warmth and love.