Reviews

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.

In You Can Escape a Crazy Man But Not Hide From a Society – 10 Years after Utøya, Ali Esbati documents his first-hand experiences of the mass shooting on the Norwegian island of Utøya, and the ominous political and cultural atmosphere that pervaded before and after it.

While the War Is Ongoing There Is No Reconciliation is a collection of articles published in Sweden and Finland over the past two years by Anna-Lena Laurén, Russian correspondent of sixteen years.

William Älgebrink's The House at the End of the Pärl River is a thriller-horror story about a search for blood.

In The Smuggler’s Treasure, a young boy visits his grandma on an island in the archipelago and discovers a 100-year-old smuggling mystery that he needs to solve before criminals do.

In To the Trees Ella-Maria Nutti explores the importance of language and culture to a sense of self and a feeling of belonging.

Together since childhood, it is no longer possible for Melvin and his friends to take their bonds for granted, nor assume what those bonds mean for each other anymore in Mikael Berglund’s novel Slush.

Catgirl and Other Stories is a new collection of graphic short stories by Anneli Furmark that brings together evocative illustrations and melancholic humour.

Mats Jonsson's Stina's joik is a moving YA graphic novel about a Sámi woman who used her extreme height to earn money for her family, while never fully living her own life.

Influencers, consumer culture and Meghan Markle writing positive messages on bananas: Liv Strömquist’s graphic novel The Pythia Talks takes on wellness culture and our fear of death.

In Chop Chop: The Story of Brave Earthling Linda Bondestam tells a complex and appealing story about a good-natured robot.

The story of one of the Little Rock Nine, Gloria. In the Shadow of Oppression is co-authored by Gloria Ray Karlmark and Elisabeth Åsbrink.

In An Endlessly Long Spring, translator Lida Starodubtseva proves her mettle on a different side of the creative process.

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.

Åsa Beckman sheds light on the traumatic experiences of children of writers in Culture Child: Growing Up in the Shadow of an Author

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.

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.

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

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.

Edith Hammar's Portal is a queer graphic novel about finding community and being seen.

Enforcers of unfree labour are victims and perpetrators: in The Slavedriver, Anders Teglund combines reportage and historical essays to examine that grim paradox.

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.

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.

What would you do if you found a beating beetroot heart in the basement? Micaela Favilla’s The Heart in the Cellar offers one possibility.

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.

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.

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.

This picture book by Annica Hedin takes an innovative approach to exploring knotty moral issues for very young children, aged 3-6 years. It begins with a question – what do we do in secret which we know is wrong, and what happens if somebody notices?

Best known for her poetry, Edith Södergran (1892 – 1923) also left a substantial body of photography. In Another Edith, award-winning book designer Nina Ulmaja analyses some of these photos and links them to Södergran’s biography – and her own.

Stylistically breathtaking, Maxim Grigoriev’s The Rain is a hypnotic ode to a city being hollowed by gentrification, as told through the fragmented conversations of a young group of residents.

Sara Gordan’s The Night was received with unanimous, overwhelmingly warm praise for her unique style of novelistic autobiography that focuses on a troubled, loving parenthood.

A Crate of Oranges tells the moving real-life story of a Jewish boy and his father forced by persecution to emigrate from Communist Poland.

Johanna Frid´s novel Harald’s Mother charts a difficult relationship between a mother and her daughter-in-law. It is a funny but at the same time deeply poignant take on love, family and relationships. A perfect read for book club discussions.

In Lotta Geffenblad’s life-affirming and humorous picturebooks about the lovably odd couple Tora and Tytte, size does not matter if you care for one another. Together the couple explores everyday chores with unexpected, hilarious results and a deep sense of the small pleasures of everyday life.

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.

In Half of Malmö’s Men Have Dumped Me, Amanda Romare takes the reader on a Mr Toad’s wild ride of sex, laughs and disappointment.

In They’re Taking Everything Away from Me, An intense YA novel set in Northern Sweden, Linda Jones describes Frida, a fifteen-year-old coming of age in a community that is falling apart.

In Lotta Geffenblad’s life-affirming and humorous picturebooks about the lovably odd couple Tora and Tytte, size does not matter if you care for one another. Together the couple explores everyday chores with unexpected, hilarious results and a deep sense of the small pleasures of everyday life.

The Story of Bodri is a simple introduction to the Holocaust for young children, told from the perspective of a girl and her beloved dog.

Nominated for 2023 Nordic Council Literature Prize, A Book For Nobody surprises and delights thanks to Isabella Nilsson’s playful approach to writing about difficult topics.

Inger Edelfeldt's Scheherazade-like sequence for today’s fantasy fans weaves an unsettling tale of suppression of freedom in multiple worlds and provides a pithy commentary on the mechanics of storytelling in the process.

Mao’s Hibiscus is a story of a decades’ long friendship between former Maoists, cemented by the obligation to look after a suitcase of money. They eventually invest the money, but their investment has fatal consequences, and everything points to the involvement of the Russian secret services.

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.

A band of orphans fights for survival – and against each other – in The Bear Hunter’s Daughters, Anneli Jordahl’s feminist retelling of Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers. While the sisters prove that women can do everything men can do, do they really want to?

You Are Not My Mother and If You Meet a Bear, two new picture books illustrated by Linda Bondestam, have very different narratives and styles, but both reveal an artist at the height of her powers.

Punishment depicts life in a harsh 1950s boarding school for the children of Sámi reindeer herders, and how those children grapple with their trauma thirty years on.