Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

In Mia Franck's Gallantry, four young friends find a novel way around some of the restrictions faced by women in Helsinki in 1912.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?