Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.