Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.