Reviews

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The year is 2035...

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

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.

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

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

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.

A story of forbidden love and ostracism.

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.

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.

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 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.