Codename Faust

‘What does Sara Nowak know?’ This is the last question priest Jürgen Stiller is asked before he is executed by ex-terrorist Faust. Then the killer begins the hunt for Sara Nowak. Gustaf Skördeman’s highly-anticipated sequel to Geiger.

‘What does Sara Nowak know?’

This is the last question priest Jürgen Stiller is asked before he is executed by ex-terrorist Faust. Then the killer begins the hunt for Sara Nowak.

Sara is fully occupied by the ongoing chaos in her personal life and she has no idea that she is being targeted until she is fired upon in her own home. The trail leads back to West Germany and a string of small, radical cells of terrorist fanatics. What was Operation Wahasha? Who is hiding behind the codename Faust? Sara Nowak has little to go on and meantime Faust is getting ever closer…

The Other Sister

Former FBI agent John Adderley returns in Mohlin & Nyström’s second thriller.

The highly anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed Scandi-noir thriller The Bucket List. Alicia Bjelke has always been the “other sister,” the foil to her beautiful sister Stella―people turn their backs when they see Alicia’s disfigured face. So she created a life in the background, becoming a coding genius and founding a groundbreaking dating app company. With Stella as the face of the company, Alicia has found success. Until one day, when Stella is found dead and Alicia’s life takes the wrong turn. Soon, she realizes that she is the next target. The case is given to former FBI agent John Adderley, who is still in Karlstad under a new identity. He is haunted by shadows of his past and is about to leave Sweden when the game plan changes. Instead of running, he is forced to once and for all face his past, and the murder investigation gives him a way out. If he can go through with his plan, he might have a shot at the freedom he has so long wanted to have. But is it too late? In a successful mix of high-octane suspense and psychological depth, authors Peter Mohlin and Peter Nyström deliver a thrilling sequel in the John Adderley series. The Other Sister is an ambitious crime thriller that is tight, layered, and gripping from start to finish.

Son of Svea: A Tale of the People’s Home

“This is the story of a twentieth-century Swede. A man without cracks but with a great split running through him, and in this he entirely resembled the society he populated and shaped.”

“Lena Andersson’s epic novel moves through a century of Scandinavian idealism like a winter storm. Son of Svea opens with the founding of social democracy, roars on through the rise of the welfare state and the murder of Olof Palme, and reaches an icy end in the ex-utopian Stockholm suburbs. Lena Andersson has an unparalleled eye for how ideology and family life interweave, turning the myths of modernism into something warmer and more intimate. Andersson’s novel is a powerful ode to the humble people who gave Scandinavia the one thing America misses most of all: upward mobility that is more than just a dream.” —Mikkel Rosengaard, author of The Invention of Ana

“Intellectual, agile, sharp, occasionally uncomfortable, always uncompromising, Son of Svea is a novel about modern Sweden from our most important voice, Lena Andersson. Her crystal-clear prose shapes Son of Svea into an absolute gem of a book.” —David Lagercrantz, #1 bestselling author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web

The Deathwatch Beetle

A young woman disappears from an island community. Retired detective inspector Ann Lindell wants to know why.

Cecilia, a young Swedish woman, has disappeared from the Baltic island where she grew up. An old friend claims to have seen her in a park in Lisbon. Tangled relationships in a small island community emerge when retired detective inspector Ann Lindell hears about this, and decides to investigate.

The Herd: How Sweden chose its own path through the worst pandemic in 100 years

A real-life thriller about a nation in crisis, and the controversial decisions its leaders made during the COVID-19 pandemic.

First, the government instituted no restrictions. Then, it didn’t order the wearing of face masks. While the rest of the world looked on with incredulity, condemnation, admiration, and even envy, a small country in Northern Europe stood alone. As COVID-19 spread across the globe rapidly, the world shut down. But Sweden remained open.

The Swedish COVID-19 strategy was alternately lauded and held up as a cautionary tale by international governments and journalists alike — with all eyes on what has been dubbed ‘The Swedish Experiment’. But what made Sweden take such a different path?

In The Herd, journalist Johan Anderberg narrates the improbable story of a small nation that took a startlingly different approach to fighting the virus, guiding the reader through the history of epidemiology and the ticking-clock decisions that pandemic decision-makers were faced with on a daily basis.

‘In his fine book The Herd, the Swedish journalist Johan Anderberg has chronicled the development of the Swedish policy and how tough it was for its architect, Anders Tegnell, to stay the course as country after country was stampeded into compulsory and comprehensive lockdowns.’
MATT RIDLEY, THE TELEGRAPH

‘A gripping analysis of the Swedish response, which examines how tensions between science, policy and politics heightened as the virus held on. If any book were capable of turning scientific debate into a thriller, this one does so; and for the armchair experts on COVID-19 that many of us have become, it is a must-read.’
FRIEDA KLOTZ, SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

The Antarctica of Love

The story of a young woman’s brief life, her brutal murder, and the world that moves on without her.

A devastating novel about absolute vulnerability, brutality and isolation, by Sara Stridsberg.

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2023 and the National Translation Award in Prose 2023.

 

The Lonely Ones

Group dynamics can create aching loneliness when there are dark secrets to be kept, even for the golden youth of Uppsala University. Fasten your seatbelts for DI Barbarotti’s intriguing fourth case.

In 1969, six very diverse young people in the old university city of  Uppsala are embarking on their studies. Two are brother and a sister. Two are young men who have just done national service together. One is a class warrior, one a theology student, one a would-be entrepreneur, and one a a future journalist. There are two odd young people who may well be geniuses. The group’s lives become inextricably intertwined, but a summer trip through Eastern Europe changes everything, and when their time at university is over, it also signals the end of something else.

Years later, a lecturer at Lund University is found dead at the bottom of a cliff in the woods close to Kymlinge. And chillingly, it is the very same spot where one of the Uppsala students died thirty-five years before.

We Know You Remember

A missing girl, a hidden body, a decades-long cover-up, and old sins cast in new light: the classic procedural meets Scandinavian atmosphere in this rich, character-driven mystery, awarded Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year, that heralds the American debut of a supremely skilled international writer.

It’s been more than twenty years since Olof Hagström left home. Returning to his family’s house, he knows instantly that something is amiss. The front door key, hidden under a familiar stone, is still there. Inside, there’s a panicked dog, a terrible stench, water pooling on the floor: the father Olaf has not seen or spoken to in decades is dead in the bathroom shower.

For police detective Eira Sjödin, the investigation of this suspicious death resurrects long-forgotten nightmares. She was only nine when Olof Hagström, then fourteen, was found guilty of raping and murdering a local girl. The case left a mark on the town’s collective memory—a wound that never quite healed—and tinged Eira’s childhood with fear. Too young to be sentenced, Olof was sent to a youth home and exiled from his family. He was never seen in the town again. Until now.

An intricate crime narrative in which past and present gracefully blend, We Know You Remember is a relentlessly suspenseful and beautifully written novel about guilt and memory in which nothing is what it seems, and unexpected twists upend everything you think you know.

The Unnatural Selection of Our Species

With CRISPR-Cas9 and other gene technologies, humanity now has the godlike ability to edit our own genetic material – the human genome.

Out on 22 September 2021.

These revolutionary new tools have huge potential to save lives and prevent untold suffering – but what ethical issues do they raise?

The Story of Bodri

Hédi Fried and Stina Wirsén (illustrator) have created a touching portrait of a Jewish child who survived World War II, and her firm belief as an adult in democracy and human rights.

A painful, true story from a survivor of Auschwitz about her childhood experiences.

The Angel House

With this series of novels focused on the lives of ordinary women in the small southern Swedish railway town of Katrineholm, storyteller extraordinaire Kerstin Ekman provides an alternative history and a fine depiction of a town and a society in transition.

The Angel House is the third in the remarkable series of free-standing novels that cemented Kerstin Ekman’s reputation in her native Sweden in the 1970s, long before she achieved world-wide success with novels like Blackwater and The Forest of Hours. It follows the fortunes of the inhabitants of a provincial Swedish town, familiar from the first two books in the series, from the late 1920s to the Second World War, when events beyond the boundaries of neutral Sweden disrupt the regular rhythms of life.

Winner of the George Bernard Shaw Prize 2002.

First published by Norvik Press in 2002, this new edition of the quartet, known as ‘Women and the City’ is designed to reach a new audience. Read more about  The Angel House and the series as a whole in the mini-essays on the Norvik Press news blog.

 

The End of Summer

The Universal Translator

A fascinating exploration of invented languages from Esperanto to Elvish.

If you think about it, all languages are made up – some are just more open about it than others.

In The Universal Translator, Yens Wahlgren heads up an expedition through time, space and multiple universes to explore the words that have built worlds. From the classic constructed languages of Star Trek and Tolkien to (literally) Orwellian Newspeak and pop-culture sensations such as Game of Thrones, The Witcher and The Mandalorian, this is your portal to over a hundred realms and lexicons – and perhaps the starting point to creating your own.

Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in An Economy Built for Men

A razor-sharp look at the ways women –and their game changing ideas– are excluded from the global economy.

Why did it take us 5,000 years to attach wheels to a suitcase? How did bras take us to the moon? And what does whale hunting have to do with our economy?

Bestselling author Katrine Marçal reveals the shocking ways our deeply ingrained ideas about gender continue to hold us back. Every day, extraordinary inventions and innovative ideas are side-lined in a world that remains subservient to men.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. From the beginning of time, women have been pivotal to our society, offering ingenious solutions to some of our most vexing problems. More recently, it is women who have transformed the way we shop online, revolutionised the lives of disabled people and put the climate crisis at the top of the agenda.

Despite these successes, we still fail to find and fund the game-changing ideas that could alter the future of our planet, giving just 3% of venture capital to female founders. Instead, ingrained ideas about men and women continue to shape our economic decisions; favouring men and leading us to the same tired set of solutions.

For too long we have underestimated the consequences of sexism in our economy, and the way it holds all of us – women and men – back. Katrine Marcal’s blistering critique sets the record straight and shows how, in a time of crisis, the ingenuity and intelligence of women is that very thing that can save us.

The Lost Village

The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar in this brilliantly disturbing thriller from Camilla Sten, an electrifying new voice in suspense.

Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left—a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn—have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened.

But there will be no turning back.

Not long after they’ve set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. People go missing. As doubt breeds fear and their very minds begin to crack, one thing becomes startlingly clear to Alice:

They are not alone.

They’re looking for the truth…
But what if it finds them first?

Come find out.

The Family Clause

“… a tender, funny and bruising novel about what it means to be a good parent, the difficulty of understanding those closest to us, and how it sometimes takes courage just to stick around. An ode to families, their dynamics, their boundaries and their silences, in all their messy glory, it reveals one of the real challenges in life: how to stop your family defining your destiny.”

Finalist 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature

Longlisted for the 2021 Pen Translation Prize

Black Ice

An exciting thriller by Carin Gerhardsen set on Gotland.

Many exciting things happen in this book that is translated from Swedish and where I have written words here to extend this point.

To Cook A Bear

“So much to relish here . . . the plot is gripping, there’s a beautifully handled thread on reading and writing, and the writing is just lovely!” DIANE SETTERFIELD, author of Once Upon A River

It is the summer of 1852 in Kengis, a village in the far north of Sweden, where revivalist preacher Lars Levi Laestadius and Jussi, his young Sami protégé, set out to solve a heinous crime.

Winner of the Petrona Award 2021.

The Little Birds’ Art Tour!

A delightful and illuminative art book for children and curious grown ups offering a cheeky bird’s eye view of works from the Swedish Nationalmuseum collection.

An art book for children and curious grown-ups.

The Secret Life of Farts

Hilarious children’s picture book with rhyming verse.

A toot or a blow,
A honk or a squeak,
Each fart is special,
Each fart is unique!

 

A laugh-out-loud illustrated journey into the secret world of farts.

Kallocain

Written midway between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the terrible events of the Second World War were unfolding, Kallocain depicts a totalitarian ‘World State’ which seeks to crush the individual entirely.

In this desolate, paranoid landscape of ‘police eyes’ and ‘police ears’, the obedient citizen and middle-ranking scientist Leo Kall discovers a drug that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. But can private thought really be obliterated? Karin Boye’s chilling novel of creeping alienation shows the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance, no matter how futile.

The Silent War

Spooks and family life collide, with dramatic effect.

This is the freestanding sequel to Andreas Norman’s International Dagger shortlisted debut novel.

Things My Son Needs to Know About The World

“a tender and funny series of letters from a new father to his son about one of life’s most daunting experiences: parenthood.”