Reviews

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.

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.

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.