Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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?

Tuva Korsström’s latest work is an autobiographical essay that expands into a double biography of her parents.

Yani is a coming of age novel dealing with friendship, love, grief, belonging and what to do when your best friend is threatened with deportation.

Anna Charlotta Gunnarson follows her critically acclaimed and August Prize-nominated book Pop Rhymes with Politics with The Women that Shaped Pop Music History, in which she uncovers women who have played an integral part in the development of the popular music industry.

A moving new graphic memoir about tracing a family lost through the Holocaust, Remember Us To Life grapples not only with the war itself, but also its impact on younger generations and contemporary perspectives on minorities and outsiderness.

In Jonas Gren's The Chromosome Park, Ella navigates genetic illness and loss in a world where reflective cloth covers the ground in an attempt to reflect the sun's warmth back into space, and a thousand small, organic volcanoes are utilised to build a protective layer to shield Earth.

A farm in western Finland is passed down through four hundred years of the same family. Inherited Land explores family bonds and traditions, as well as individual personalities and experiences, of generations of the extended Nevabacka family.

Johannes Anyuru is a master of portraying contemporary Western European city life with poetic tenderness. With his latest novel, he takes us to a working-class immigrant neighbourhood in Antwerp, where a mother grapples with the dissolving boundaries of the life she has created for her son.

In Nina Hemmingsson’s Room Without Title, we follow a woman who is trying to untangle an age-old conundrum: how did she end up in a bad relationship, and why can’t she leave?

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.

An in-depth and readable analysis of Russia and its leadership in the post-Soviet era, The Fallen Empire looks at the developments, events and rhetorical manoeuvres that led the country where it is today.

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.

A green-fingered resting actress and her poker-playing nephew solve crimes in the Swedish countryside in Carin Hjulström’s cozy crime novel Just a Small Murder.

Ulla-Lena Lundberg and Negar Naseh: two women writers from different generations and cultural backgrounds, with voices as distinctive as the settings of their narratives. Their novels Light and Flame and A Handful of Wind offer spell-binding insights into the landscapes of their minds.

Dream Baby Dream by Jenny Tunedal is a tour de force attempt to come to grips with the overwhelming oppression of grief, and it has been lauded by critics across the board in Sweden.