2018:1

‘Holy forests, / where every tree within itself / bears a thousand icons, which were not painted by human hand. / See, a vast forest of icons!’

Rattle Rustle Walk is a lovely collection of poetry that is just right for young readers and they, like the tree in winter with its leaves falling, will be sad when it is over.

Hannah Lutz's Wild Boar questions ‘[...] which species, which animals and which people are welcome where? And who decides that?’

A skilled wordsmith and nature writer, Niemi juxtaposes lyrical pastoral beauty with the grotesque and the hideous. He is able to enchant, lull and repulse in equal measure. This is writing that will make you think.

The book’s strength lies in the interplay between emotions and environment, and the way that is expressed, with the island’s song as the theme tune: ‘the song tonight is so strong I feel as if I could catch it in my hands.’

‘The real world, the one outside, does not want to take her… She refused to obey. They beat her black and blue at the penitentiary but she still did not do what she was told, and they realised in the end that they would have to kill her or send her to hospital. So it was the hospital.'

‘Always the same question when it comes to people. Whose will was stronger?’

The old school of fairy tales – the ones that make even adults afraid to walk through the woods alone.

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

In fact, the word ‘opinion’ has no plural in the local language. While Parisian intellectuals have mooted the idea of a prototypical kilogram, the narrator is startled to discover Thule’s equivalent: a ‘standard national Opinion’, protected by a glass dome.

When a snowstorm descends on the wedding party, it is so cold the knife won’t cut through the wedding cake and the bubbles freeze in the champagne glasses.

But we are pulled back from the brink: what if the notion of humanity being in charge is, after all, an enabling, hopeful story to tell ourselves?

Although the refugee crisis was depicted by press and politicians as a crisis in Sweden, Banke’s book is a timely reminder that the asylum seekers are in fact the ones facing a crisis.

Mannerheim’s story is the story of Finland and, as well as being an account of one man’s character and career, the book makes an accessible and engaging introduction to Finland’s twentieth-century history.

It is surprising to learn that we now readily accept the presence of mallards, swans, cormorants, mandarin ducks, tufted ducks, goldeneye and a host of other species, all of which were wholly unknown in urban or built-up areas a hundred years ago.