Reviews

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.

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.

Lundin challenges the reader to take notice.

A readable, fascinating journey into politicised crime, set in a past that feels both distant and very close.

‘I was Händel. I am nobody. This is my tale of immortality and beauty.’

Even as a fictional character he would be fascinating. But he was real.

Saga has just started secondary school when she meets him: the man who is to become her obsession, ‘Stockholm’s most beautiful man’.

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.