Reviews

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Acclaimed author Jonas Hassen Khemiri returns with The Sisters, a novel that balances expertly on the line between past and present, Sweden and America, reality and fiction.

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.

Murder in academia: The Hawk Sings of Death is a literary crime novel set at Uppsala University by an author based there.

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.

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

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.

Under the piercing, watchful eye of the main character Anne in Carolina Ringskog Ferrada-Noli’s wildly entertaining and, at the same time, crushing novel It Is Chronic, the ways of today’s (western) world are picked apart and observed through the lens of pain.

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

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.

A curator’s eye tour of an art museum, The Maintenance Labyrinth, Ida Börjel’s dialogue in poem form is narrated with an eye for the details of objects and their conservation, as well as subtle humour.

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.