Reviews

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 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.

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.

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.