2015:2

As the pages turn, each successive image zooms out, first to the park, then to the town, countryside, ocean, earth, moon and eventually the solar system.

A comic book with kidnappings, changelings, fortunes sought and happy homecomings.

Haridi grapples with tricky subjects such as mental illness and urban poverty from a child’s skewed perspective.

As in Alejandro Almenábar’s 2001 film ‘The Others’, the encounters with the dead challenge and unsettle our perception of reality.

Saga is a strong female character; it’s a delight to read a novel about a teenage girl who finds her own way and isn’t afraid of being different.

Öland: ‘A place where a chilly, salty taste forms a membrane, coating and soothing ever-open wounds which will always struggle to heal’.

The setting, the ‘Indian village’ – a nickname for the flats belonging to the local Volvo factory – symbolises the democratic dream of providing a decent life for all workers. But the dream of equality is trashed by the brokenness of those who live there today.

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

Nothing is what it seems in Edenborg’s counterfactual historical romance.

‘Bonsai cats’ are cats which were stuffed into glass vessels as kittens to restrict their physical growth and so become moulded into an unnatural shape at the will of their owners. Human children may, in a comparable way, be brought up forcibly conditioned, in the social bottles adults squeeze them into.

There are different ways to write about the Holocaust.

Kristina Sandberg’s monumental trilogy about Maj Berglund, a housewife from the small town of Örnsköldsvik, is a tour de force.

Alsterdal has been carving out a niche as a writer of page-turners with a political, international flavour.

The thriller lives!

One should expect nothing less from a press born of the short-lived magazine Const Literary (P)review.

A provocative retelling of Roland Paulsen’s study of Sweden’s Public Employment Service.

We have two different parents: one called Yeltsin, the other Putin.

‘Of course, Stalin wasn’t as perfect as Putin’.

Readers will surely ponder these perceptive, thought-provoking essays long afterwards.