The second volume and Batchelder honor recipient of Annika Thor’s Faraway island series. Too old for the island elementary school. Stephie is allowed by her foster family to continue her education in Gothenburg. Another transition awaits, as well as first love and the endless fear of the war and the fate of the girls’ parents. Nellie is now alone on the island, and becoming more and more adapted to her new life in Sweden, at the expense of her memories of home and family.

A story of robbery and murder, retribution, love and betrayal plays out against the backdrop of the stalwart fishing community in the West Coast archipelago. Young Elsalill, sole survivor of the mass killing in the home of rich Lord Arne, becomes a pawn in dangerous games both earthly and supernatural. As the deep-frozen sea stops the murderers escaping, the price that must be paid is sacrifice and atonement.

The Jews of the Nazi-administered Polish ghetto of Lodz in the Second World War were led by a strangely two-faced authority figure who realised his own survival depended on making the ghetto indispensable by turning it into an efficient industrial machine. But what of the starving cogs in his machine, the individuals desperate to believe that the trains onto which they are herded will take them to other work camps and better futures? Termed ‘one of the great Holocaust novels of the twentieth century’, this book won the prestigious August prize and has been published in over twenty languages.

This short novel serves as the introduction to the other two volumes of The Löwensköld Trilogy.  It introduces the Löwensköld family and the curse that comes to hover over them for several generations.

(Translated jointly with Stuart Tudball)

A pale, style-conscious, politically-correct town librarian, recently widowed, and a bachelor dairy farmer mourning his capable mother and desperately in need of a traditional, hard-working wife – it’s never going to work. But the chemistry between them proves totally irresistible in this, probably the best-known novel by one of Sweden’s most popular comic writers.

ISBN 9781907595073

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.