Reviews

The American Girl takes an ambitious stylistic leap into a more fragmented narrative, a post-modern, kaleidoscopic vehicle conveying the chaotic, inexplicable and unintelligible world of children and adolescents from dysfunctional families.

This is a difficult and demanding but above all beautiful book, in which short spare poems of elegiac lyricism contrast with longer works with an extraordinary sense of the rhythmic possibility of the Swedish language. 

Under cover of darkness, on the night train from Moscow to Helsinki, Ivan Demidov tells the story of his life to a virtual stranger. The listener, much like the author of this book, is a woman, a writer, a Russian living in Helsinki.

In Terra nullius we encounter Sven Lindqvist's intriguing blend of travel writing, history, and personal indignation about man’s inhumanity to man, all related in Lindqvist’s characteristic, calmly paced, consciously laconic tone. 

Bengt Ohlsson's novel plays off an ingenious conceit, retelling the events recounted in Hjalmar Söderberg’s classic novel Doktor Glas from the point of view of that novel’s cuckolded and ultimately doomed priest, Gregorius. 

The Manor House is a chilling tale of rivalries, jealousies and passions. The central plot has the claustrophobic confinement of a chamber play, yet the action takes place against a disturbing backdrop of the breakdown of social order in an unspecified place and time.

Zvonimir Popović's novel is a poetical work that forms a strong and complex picture of the Yugoslav experience while at the same time reaching beyond particularities of time and place.

Steve Sem-Sandberg's documentary novel is contained within a narrative alive with fantasy and wry humour, a fascinating and engrossing break with Sem-Sandberg’s usually systematic and lucid style.

All Wild is deceptive – a work of autobiography far greater than the sum of its parts. 

This novel, if we can call such a hybrid book a novel, opens with some stark official statistics: since 1965, a total of 176,164 individuals have been reported missing in Sweden. Of these, 21,492 have never been found. 

Westö’s latest oeuvre is a classic psychological thriller set in the Finnish capital, Helsinki. 

This latest slim – very slim – volume consists of five rather enigmatic short poems and eleven groups of haiku containing from just one poem up to six. At a single haiku to a page, they do not lack the emphasis that the form demands. 

This book is something very unusual – a genuinely witty piece of self-deprecating autobiography. It is also an exploration of the obsessive tendencies of collectors, the mentality of island dwellers, and a biographical peek at the obscure life of celebrated entomologist and erstwhile sable farmer René Malaise. 

Agneta Pleijel's first volume of poetry for twenty years has many sources. Some of the poems are recent, others reworkings of earlier material, in some cases first published elsewhere and now collected here. 

When Finland's Cause became my Cause - Memories of War and Peace is a highly objective and well-balanced memoir. 

Mikael Niemi’s second work for adults comprises nineteen tales, linked through setting, themes and narrative voice, and described by the author as science fiction. 

Addressing an audience at the Gothenburg Book Fair in September 2004, Ellen Mattson described Splendorville, her sixth book, as a story of sorrow and loss.

In Jacqueline Karp's first full collection of poetry, she discovers the cultures of Berlin, the Czech Republic, the Baltic States, Poland and, above all, Sweden, sharing her personal reactions to sights, sounds and tastes.