Reviews

What is evil, and how does it relate to who we are? Is the desert the setting of Sami Said's thematically heavy, yet lyrically light novel, or is it the emotional world itself? There is life in every corner, but is the desert chiefly pregnant with miracles, or evil?

With its appealingly coloured tales of a group of twenty-something friends that shun strict realism for a more psychological take, Cecilia Vårhed’s graphic novel Empty Boasting has fun with the genre.

Elisabeth Åsbrink's My Big, Beautiful Hatred portrays a gifted writer torn apart by the conflicting demands that late nineteenth-century society placed on female authors and intellectuals.

The phrase: ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’, can be used to describe many works of fiction and non-fiction written on the subject of popular music in the last 60 or so years. Marcus Berggren’s book, A Good Place in the Brain, is certainly one of these, and to which can be added the phrase, ‘with a wry sense of humour.’

In Annika Norlin’s debut novel The Ant Hill, An alternative lifestyle brings rewards and challenges for a group of people who reject mainstream society.

Alma Thörn’s children’s book Wednesdays at the Swimming Pool is a lavishly illustrated and irresistibly empathetic tale of what it feels like to struggle with anxiety.

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?