Reviews

The year is 1676, and men and women stand accused of witchcraft and leading others into Satan’s clutches. In Sisela Lindblom's Burn!, one nasty little girl just wants to watch them burn.

In an expansive collection of poetry dealing explicitly with climate change and COVID-19, Malte Persson explores the meaning of time of and beyond humanity. Annihilation, ranging in scope from single poems to a 60-page epic, uses rhyme to impose a sense of order in an increasingly disordered world.

Eija Hetekivi Olsson's The Young Ones We Kill is an at times harrowing mother-daughter story about the consequences of bullying in schools, segregation in the suburbs of Gothenburg, and the love and fear of a mother fighting for her daughter.

Literary critic Rasmus Landström's The Return of Working-Class Literature offers a thorough survey and analysis of a uniquely Swedish publishing tradition that remains largely inaccessible to Anglophone readers.

In Zinat Pirzadeh's gripping true story Butterfly on a leash, over the course of one night in Teheran, a young woman has to make the most important decision of her life. As she waits for dawn to arrive, she thinks about the girl she was.

Mats Jonsson tried to avoid thinking about his Sámi heritage for decades. In When We Were Sámi he realises that he has no choice but to face it and to try to understand where Sámi people fit in Sweden’s history.

In Johan Rundberg's The Night Raven, the merciless winter of 1880, an abandoned newborn and a murder all coincide to push eleven-year-old Mika, an orphan, into exploring her past and solving a mystery in the city of Stockholm.

In Anneli Jordahl's Like the Dogs in Lafayette Park, a Swedish woman obsessed with class-related injustice finds inspiration in the work of the Black Panther movement.

Felicia Stenroth's Movements of the Hand is a taut, strikingly written representation of modern-day exploitation, and a powerful account of the lasting psychological effects of poverty.

In Sara Lundberg's The Day of Forgetting, we see that some days are just like that. You forget what you’re supposed to do or where you’re supposed to go. You might even embarrass yourself by getting things wrong. But don’t worry: we all know what it feels like, and we know it does get better.

Cotton Angel, the first in Susanna Alakoski's epic quartet of novels covering the lives of four generations of working women, vividly depicts a Finnish cotton mill community during the years from Finland’s Civil War to the aftermath of World War II.

As well as being an impeccably researched biography of Märta Tikkanen, a writer who became a Nordic feminist icon, Johanna Holmström’s Ought to shut up – a book about Märta Tikkanen is a dialogue between its author’s 21st-century #metoo feminism and its subject’s feminism of the 1970s and 1980s.

Authoritarianism, rhetoric and protest: scenes from daily life. Anna-Lena Laurén's The Velvet Dictatorship. Resistance and fellow-travellers in today’s Russia. is a highly readable collection of essays on contemporary Russia written by an expert in the area.

A woman is admitted to a secure psychiatric ward claiming she needs to prevent a terrorist attack. In the suspenseful thriller Black sun, Andreas Norman unpicks a white supremacist conspiracy to assassinate the Swedish prime minister.

In Ann-Helén Laestadius' Stolen, a nine-year-old Sámi girl in Arctic Sweden witnesses a hate crime. The trauma will remain with her into young adulthood, when she will battle for the rights of her people – and herself as a future reindeer herder.

After more than two hundred years, Sweden’s national poet finally has a literary biography. In Bellman. The Biography, Carina Burman sketches the life of Carl Michael Bellman in a lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched work.

The Swedish word sorgearbete (mourning) evokes the work we do to process our sorrow. The Singularity, the latest novel from Kurdish-Swedish author Balsam Karam, is the embodiment of such work, and can only be described as lyrical, stirring, and immensely powerful.

The Wolf Run, the latest novel by doyenne of Swedish literature, Kerstin Ekman, resonates with a wisdom deeply rooted in nature.