The Sword of Justice

The Crow Girl

The Wednesday Club

My Little Small

One of World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2018.

Ulf Stark and Linda Bondestam’s sweetly eccentric children’s picture book My Little Small tells the story of a creature who lives alone in a cave until she befriends a sun spark.

The Anatomy of Inequality

From a country with one of the world’s lowest rates of income and social imbalance, award-winning Swedish analyst Per Molander’s book changes the conversation about the causes and effects of inequality.

Virtually all human societies are marked by inequality, at a level that surpasses what could be expected from normal differences in individuals capabilities alone. So begins this new approach to the greatest social ill of our time, and nearly every other era.

Mårbacka

Once they were ready at around half-past seven, their beds hastily made, a tray would be sent up from the kitchen bearing bowls of oatmeal with cream piped on top and some big open-sandwiches made with home-baked crispbread.

There is sadness and joy, security and affection, loss and tribulation and generally never a dull moment for Selma and her siblings growing up at Mårbacka. Named after the author’s beloved childhood home and first published in 1922, this book is the first part of a notionally autobiographical trilogy and an enchanting, in many ways surprising text. It can be read as many things; memoir, autofiction, even part of Lagerlöf’s myth-making about her own successful writing career. It is part folklore, part social and family history, part mischievous satire in the guise of an innocent child’s-eye narrative, part declaration of a daughter’s love for a fallible father. A medley of anecdotes and a kaleidoscope of local characters sweep the book along to its culmination in a huge, glorious, valedictory summer night’s birthday party.

The Gravity of Love

“I’ll put my head in the oven so you know where I am,” he whispers, kissing her neck.

Jim has attempted suicide several times. During his incarceration at the Beckomberga hospital for the mentally unstable, he voices his determination to succeed. Some day soon, he tells his daughter – as he has earlier told his mother and his wife – he will swallow sixty tablets, help them down with a bottle of whisky, and swim impossibly far out into the Atlantic.

The Gravity of Love shows how close nightmare can be to normality, and how relationships can briefly light up the lives of people wanting to end it all.

An intensely poetic novel set in and around Beckomberga hospital, near Stockholm. By the middle of the 20th century it was one of Europe’s largest psychiatric institutions.

The Parable Book

“The love that dare not speak its name . . .”

Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15 chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of.

Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, “comes out” – but in ways entirely novel and unexpected.

Enquist died in 2020. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write was to be his last.

Runner up in the Bernard Shaw Prize for Swedish Translation 2018.

 

 

And Every Morning The Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

“an exquisitely moving portrait of an elderly man’s struggle to hold on to his most precious memories, and his family’s efforts to care for him even as they must find a way to let go.”

A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

This shattering memoir movingly depicts Rosenberg’s father’s attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden.

In 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories. Göran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father’s story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the optimism, progress and collective oblivion of post-war Sweden, and the world of the father, haunted by the shadows of the past.