Sarah Death

The colours may be black and white, but Mattson shows us in beautifully well-weighed language that life seldom is.

To put it in the terms of her particular academic field, we might say she has entered her own Mannerist phase, her life descending into a grotesque caricature of itself.

There is delightful period detail in food, dress and pop songs on tangle- prone cassette tapes, but older history is ever present in this sea-facing kingdom that is trying to turn its back on time.

Virdborg’s whole book can be read as a descent into hell.

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.

It is natural as time passes to re-evaluate our relationship with our late parents.

A modern-day, working-class Swedish Miss Marple.

This linked story collection grabs us with its oddity from story one.

These diary-like collections are distilled versions of her long-running blog and, like the blog, they are illustrated, mainly with her own often quirky and slightly blurred photographs.

The butterfly effect of the title is the scientific theory that a single occurrence, no matter how tiny, can change the course of the universe forever.

An atmospheric novel set on the fictional island of Ör, off Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s native Åland Islands, finds this seasoned and much-lauded writer on top form.

This is a haunting story in which events are viewed in stream-of-consciousness style through the eyes of a grieving child.

Handberg's novel hauntingly describes that strange, becalmed yet activity-filled bubble we inhabit between the death and funeral of a parent.

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.

A witty, metafictional confection combining a thriller plot with many other strands.

A definitive collection of Harriet Löwenhjelm’s idiosyncratic, fascinating poetry, illustrated with her own paintings and drawings.

The tension is ratcheted up in Liselott Willén's well-crafted psychological drama, which is anything but a police procedural, and written in language with real savour.

Therese Bohman's chilling, atmospheric debut plumbs the darker depths of relationships.

Finland-Swedish writer Susanne Ringell’s collection of short stories provide tantalising glimpses into hidden lives, as when glinting fish dart by.

Carola Sandbacka’s historical novel focuses on the often neglected details of everyday life during the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union.

Anne Swärd’s novel is beautifully written, in controlled, evocative, at times aphoristic language; there is writing to savour on every page.

Käbi Laretei's slim volume offers rich pickings to the celebrity-hunter, the cinéaste and the classical musician alike. Sets of love letters like this will soon be a thing of the past. One imagines the leading auteurs of the twenty-first century prefer more ephemeral means of communication.

Aris Fioretos has written a wry meditation on human identity, loss and longing, and what it is to be Greek.

Jerker Virdborg is back, with an engrossing, fast-paced, deeply unsettling dystopian tale.

This novel confirms Majgull Axelsson’s position as one of Sweden’s most interesting and accomplished contemporary storytellers.

‘The absurd is a reality, he thought, forming a snowball between his hands, there’s no need to twist the text to find it, it’s there all the time.’ Year of the Black Moon, a delightful but troubling existential detective novel, follows a disillusioned scholar on an epic quest for clues and meaning when his normal life is derailed by concussion.

Katarina Mazetti's social-conscience-laced comedy shows that love between two people is not instantly recognisable but can look like just about anything, and human beings are like icebergs, nine-tenths hidden beneath the surface.

Henrik Nilsson's clever and stylish debut novel offers us an exciting, multi-layered tale set in fin de siècle Vienna, in which books are the real heroes and Vatican bankers and Papal conspiracy theories have to take their allotted place in the literary jigsaw.

Carina Burman’s witty and thoroughly researched pastiche on Victorian detective stories.

Ellen Matsson's inheritance story is part psychological drama, part minutely-observed social history, part poetry.

Seasoned author Peter Kihlgård is bidding for our attention with an experiment in form.

Göran Sahlberg's exuberant yet wistful novel with its vivid, tragic-comic account of a very unusual childhood evokes an era when Sweden felt it stood centre-stage in the world.

A curated list of recent gems in Swedish-language literary fiction, as reviewed in Swedish Book Review.

A curated list of compelling historical fiction, as reviewed in Swedish Book Review.

A curated list of recent highlights in narrative non-fiction, as reviewed in Swedish Book Review.

Celebrating Women in Translation Month, with a selection of writers and works presented in translation on Swedish Book Review.

Inger Edelfeldt combines her fascination with fantasy with a serious concern for the psychological and social pressures of the teenage years.

Jessica Kolterjahn's novel is a sustained, understated but moving portrayal of a person, sometimes baffled and sometimes euphoric, exploring her own feelings, sexuality and reactions to the world.

Åsa Linderborg's autobiographical work has been hailed as a classic of the growing-up genre so central to Sweden’s literary canon.

Susanna Alakoski’s emotionally powerful account, which won the Best Novel category of the August Prize in 2006, gives gut-wrenching insight into the life of the twelve-year-old daughter of alcoholics.

Niklas Rådström's intriguing novel takes a sideways look at the visit of Hans Christian Andersen in 1857 to the home of Charles Dickens.

Anne Swärd’s second novel is a disturbing account of a family blown apart, trying after 20 years to find each other (or perhaps avoid doing so).

The novel created a furore on publication in Sweden, where Bergman vented his displeasure on national television.

The Linnean system effectively excluded girls from formally studying botany. Ann Granhammer’s novel about the daughter of the great natural scientist can be read as a metaphor for the fate of a whole generation of young women.

The stage is set for the sixth Annika Bengtzon novel by Liza Marklund, in which our heroine finds herself in the murky world of cutting-edge medical research, where the financial and academic stakes are huge, and mutual suspicion and back-stabbing are the norm.

In Lotta Lundberg's impressive and disturbing novel, a quartet of dwarves and midgets attempts to exchange the freak-show circuit for a place to live and work with dignity.

Inger Edelfeldt's Scheherazade-like sequence for today’s fantasy fans weaves an unsettling tale of suppression of freedom in multiple worlds and provides a pithy commentary on the mechanics of storytelling in the process.