Paris is stunning in the summer

NYPD detective Jacob Kanon is on a tour of Europe’s most gorgeous cities. But the sights aren’t what draw him–he sees each museum, each cathedral, and each cafe through the eyes of his daughter’s killer.

The killing is simply marvelous

Kanon’s daughter, Kimmy, and her boyfriend were murdered while on vacation in Rome. Since then, young couples in Paris, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, and Stockholm have been found dead. Little connects the murders, other than a postcard to the local newspaper that precedes each new victim.

Wish you were here

Now Kanon teams up with the Swedish reporter, Dessie Larsson, who has just received a postcard in Stockholm–and they think they know where the next victims will be. With relentless logic and unstoppable action, The Postcard Killers may be James Patterson’s most vivid and compelling thriller yet.

This is volume one of Annika Thor’s brilliant young adult tetralogy that follows two Austrian sisters sent on a “kindertransport” to Sweden as World War II begins. They are fostered out to two very different families on an island in the Gothenburg archipelago. A Faraway Island covers their first year  in Sweden, and won the 2009 Batchelder Award.

God’s Mercy begins a trilogy that follows the lives of a number of people whose lives intertwine from the early twentieth century nearly to the present day. In this volume the protagonist is a midwife who journeys to employment in the north, following the clergyman she believes she loves. But life has a great deal more in store for her than the life of a minister’s wife.

The first book by Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) is the story of Gösta Berling, a defrocked minister, and the “cavaliers” who live on a Swedish estate in the 1820s.

Originally published in 1910, this is the classic novel of the Swedish women’s suffrage movement. Its vividly and wittily portrayed gallery of diverse female campaigners comes together to form a sisterhood that throws itself into tireless campaigning. They clash with irate conservative opponents (of both sexes) and risk both limb and reputation to win their struggle for the vote. The main protagonist, a young female journalist who is unconventional, bold and wily, finds that the trauma of love and the demands of friendship can be complicated distractions from the task in hand.

New edition 2021!

Kerstin Ekman, one of Sweden’s most highly-esteemed living writers, writes  with great love and admiration of a full year in Northern Sweden during which a puppy is separate from both his master and his mother but manages to survive in the wild.

A self-centred little man with a propeller on his back, living on the roof of your block of flats? If you are a lonely little boy like Smidge, all sorts of adventures await when you team up with such a wayward troublemaker. This rumbustious classic of Swedish children’s literature and its two sequels are now available in new translations for the twenty-first century.

ISBN 9780192727725.

Yvonne Hirdman’s biography of Alva Myrdal is an intimate, rounded portrait of one of the great women of the twentieth century.

The Director is Ingmar Bergman; the time is 1961; and the setting is the shooting of Winter Light, a film about how his life would have been if he had heeded his father’s wishes and become a priest. Gradually the visionary film-maker shapes the story on the screen, but the project is unpopular, money is short, the light is poor, and Bergman’s sense of reality begins to crack.

This work of fiction, steeped in fact, is written in pared-down language that calls on the translator constantly to deconstruct the text and piece it back together. It is like translating poetry or an extended prose poem.

In this book, Brutus Ostling has chosen to visit the realm of the eagles, especially the Sea or White-tailed Eagle and the Golden Eagle, but we also get to meet other birds such as gulls, eider ducks, forest grouse. Brutus Ostling’s unmistakable and unique photographs are interspersed with reflections on the eagle in nature. Staffan Soderblom, well known for his lyrical descriptions of nature, has written the texts – sometimes these are a comment on the pictures, sometimes they widen the perspective and deepen the interpretation.

I Studied Once At a Wonderful Faculty is a trilogy comprising Snow Leopard (1987), The Parks (1992) and After Spending a Night Among Horses (1997), coupled with a new cycle of poems, Minerals. Forsström’s poetry draws its sonorous and plangent music from the landscapes of Finland, seeking harmony between the troubled human heart and the threatened natural world. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.

The translation of After Spending a Night Among Horses is by Stina Katchadourian.

‘Icy intensity…aphoristic as well as mystical…a fragility that is wholly particular…Forsström’s visions of loneliness and despair are tempered by a lyrical pluckiness…the tenderness of snow’ – Adam Thorpe, Observer.

‘Tua Forsström’s poems give a sense of having crystallised under a great pressure…a survey of the landscape of grief, exercises in renunciation and in the affirmation of loss of love, sexuality and communion with others…She belongs to a tradition that includes Rilke, Hölderlin, Paul Celan and the great Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’ – Claes Andersson.

‘Forsström has a superb ability to use the everyday and the practical to get closer to the most complicated elements of life. Her language constantly goes through changes allowing the usual meanings of the words to be replaced by new insights which are a kind of magic ritual. Just like a Native American shaman, she can surely bring forth rain with her poetry if she wishes’ – Gustaf Widén, Hofvustadsbladet.

In Urwind, on the face of it a simple tale of a Helsinki antiquarian bookseller whose wife has left him, there is a complex layering of experience, past and present. The telling is more a matter of inner than outer events –  intimate, rapt.

In the `ur-vind’, or primordial attic, are stored not only relics from the story-teller’s past, but also memories of the neighbours, friends and relations who inhabited the apartment house in which he was brought up. The `ur-vind’ is also the cosmic wind, blowing from beyond the reassuring walls of houses and apartments. And it is the story-teller’s name Daniel Urwind, in whom is focused a wealth of literary and artistic allusions and antecedents that include the Merz-Bau of Kurt Schwitters, the paintings of Cézanne and the fiction of Kafka.

Jakob Törn, a frustrated and becalmed small-town apothecary in Sweden in 1718, finds himself called upon to cope with an influx of starving soldiers from a defeated army, and then to help with the embalming of his own dead monarch.  Winner of the Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish, it was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award.

Martin Birck’s Youth is a book rich in fin-de-siècle themes: melancholy, eroticism and decadence abound. The Stockholm depicted here is a haunting city of shadows and snowstorms, suppressed passion and loneliness. The novel traces the development of the title character from a seemingly idyllic childhood to maturity as a thirty-year-old man, an introspective outsider, critical of society, constantly searching for the truth but going through a gradual process of disillusionment.

Anne-Marie is a middle-aged woman returning to the Swedish town where she grew up to sell the old house she has inherited from her father. Memories of the past are everywhere, ensnaring her.

Born severely disabled and without the ability to walk or talk, Desirée is an “April Wtich,” clairvoyant and omniscient and cable of following the world through the eyes of both other people and animals. Addressing the themes of mother-daughter relationships, competition between women and the shortcomings of the post-war Swedish welfare state, April witch is a thrilling, fascinating story.

The second volume of the Women and the City tetralogy, The Spring follows the women the reader encountered in Witches’ Rings, mainly through the years between the World Wars.