Reviews

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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?

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

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.

The Skeleton is a picture book about a boy who breaks his arm and learns to conquer his fear of his skeleton.

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!

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?

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.

Set in quiet Ostrobothnia, Nilla Kjellsdotter’s The Girl in the Stone Park proves that horror – including the worst kind imaginable – can lurk anywhere.

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.

A Giraffe’s Heart is Unbelievably Large is a gorgeous, moving middle-grade adventure about acceptance and belonging.

The People of Strömsö by Rosanna Fellman is a prose-poetry panorama of twenty-first century life in Finland.