Reviews

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.

Set in a bleak dystopian future, Nils Lundkvist’s debut The History of the Wilderness: The Cube is a suspenseful chapter book that can be devoured in one or two sittings.

How to mourn a death that was never talked about, without even a grave to visit? In Intertwining, Pia Mariana Raattamaa Visén articulates how loss affects three subsequent generations.

How do you know if the person you have feelings for feels the same about you? Johan Ehn’s children’s book 12 Days of Summer navigates the unsafe waters of a fragile and intense first love.

Karl Kofi Ahlqvist’s Restless Nights is a quietly powerful debut. The novel follows a man in his early twenties as he tries to make ends meet, flitting between part-time work and dating older women for money.

In Hope and Destiny, set in a Sweden recovering from the ravages of the Black Death, a family of nobles attempts to wrest back control of their country. But fraught internal relations, coupled with the son’s unorthodox nature, end with the family divided against itself.

In Mirja Unge’s Dog Nights, a young woman returns to her home town after a long absence and finds some disturbing changes.

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 his award-winning poetry collection, Onkalo, Victor von Hellens depicts the solitary existence of an isolated individual in a post-apocalyptic Finland.

Heaven is Near is an exploration of the art, love and enduring legacies of Swedish writer Stig Dagerman and actress Anita Björk, written by their daughter, Lo Dagerman

If you partake in something you know is wrong and later write about it, can any value be extracted from the prose? Or is it simply wrong? August Prize-nominated Morality by Lyra Ekström Lindbäck unfolds like a thesis centred on this and other philosophical questions.

Whatever happened to memory in the former dictatorships of Central Europe? Shots in Slovakia: A Central European Tragedy highlights the shortcomings in remembrance culture that continue to hold these societies back.