Reviews

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.

This standalone sequel to Tre apor (Three Monkeys) clearly depicts the tension between staying with one’s own kind versus assimilation, and the challenges that come with belonging to various different groups.

För han var redan dö continues Eva Frantz's skillful series of stand-alone crime novels blending police procedurals with elements of noir, set against a backdrop of the rugged Finnish coast.

The work of Gösta Ågren holds a special place in Finland-Swedish – and Swedish and Finnish – literature. This collection brings together many of his works from the past 60 years.

Bestselling author Majgull Axelsson's new novel, about "a mother who isn't a mother", runs the gamut from thriller to romance and readily retains the reader’s attention throughout.

Ulrika Knutson's fascinating, vibrant biographical narrative explores the life of Elin Wägner, one of Sweden's most important writers of the early 1900s.

The most recent work by veteran Swedish author Agneta Pleijel is an engaging novel centring on the real-life meeting in 1969 between Agatha Christie and the Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka

In Tullias värld, Kerstin Ekman sets out with grace, inventiveness and often anger to shed light on the hidden lives of the women of Ancient Rome.

'I was born ready to flee.' Elisabeth Åsbrink's genre-bending book portrays three generations of women against the background of Jewish diaspora history.

In the middle-grade novel Lindormars land, Frida Nilsson writes about the need and desire for love and about the difficult choices we sometimes have to make.

They were once a professional couple living a comfortable, middle-class existence in Stockholm. Now Simon is missing and Jenny is searching for him. In Nidamörkur, Fröberg Idling combines a literary style with horror's ability to depict humanity's dark sides.

Överallt och ingenstans is a well-crafted, pleasantly meandering chapter book that brings together the small and big things in life, like cozy Friday nights, lice and complicated friendships.

Nattexpressen is an exciting story for children that opens up opportunities for conversations on a hard topic: how to talk about people who have changed or who are no longer themselves.

Kina Nilsson’s lapidary free verse poems, 77 of which are published in this anthology, are a testimony to the dedication of the hospital staff who have borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Beate Grimsrud's semi-autobiographical final novel - written in Swedish and self-translated into Norwegian - is an astonishing exploration of what it means for an individual life – ‘a giant dot’ – to be erased.

Lucia is 26 when she has a brain haemorrhage and is left with an impaired capacity to remember anything short-term. Josefin Roos' powerful novel draws on her own real-life experience to explore the complex terrain of brain damage.