Reviews

Spoiler alert! This book will alter your perceptions of fake news, cancel culture and ‘experts.’ Olof Hallonsten’s The Critical Conscience of Modernity: A social science that is useful is both timely and necessary. Hallonsten tackles critics of social sciences head on to reject many of their criticisms.

In She Doesn’t Remember, a writer, psychologist and literary translator is inspired to write a moving, timely account of his mother’s dementia that will resonate with many readers outside Sweden.

A commentary on the reception of refugees in Sweden, told through the eyes of a young woman working with unaccompanied minors, The Afghan Sons is an award-winning novel with a sense of connection.

The Mystery of Helmersbruk Manor is a spooky but heart-warming Christmas mystery for middle-grade readers.

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.

Travelling between Dimension Homesickness and Dimension Viking Line, Edith Hammar's Homo Line is a graphic novel about dislocation, gentrification, and a lesser-known aspect of wartime Helsinki.

Love is love, even for young reindeer herders: Moa Backe Åstot's Polar Fire is a fresh take on teen romance from the far North.

Kjell Johansson has been writing insightful stories about people in insecure jobs since long before the lot of the precariat became the trendiest of socio-political topics. Bad People offers gripping insights into the different ways humanity is undermined by social insecurity.

Borderland is a new outing for Aino Trosell’s working-class heroine Siv Dahlin, who is now a postwoman in the remote region of Finnmark, where cuts in services are piling on the pressure and local sensibilities are stirred by both wolf attacks and refugee problems.

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.