Easy Concrete
Translator: B.J. Woodstein
A book all about fun and inspiring things to do with concrete.
Fourteen Gardens
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Ulf Nordfjell
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Year of Publication: 2010
Red Wolf
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Liza Marklund
Publisher: Corgi
Year of Publication: 2010
A Faraway Island
Translator: linda.schenck
Author: Annika Thor
Publisher: Random House
Year of Publication: 2009
All these two young Jewish girls from have is each other, and the hope that their parents will be able to join them in Sweden or that the war will end. As the war intensifies the girls try to find their feet on a rugged island off the western coast of Sweden in two families very different from each other and from the one they have left behind.
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
Translator: linda.schenck
Author: Kerstin Ekman
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Year of Publication: 2009
On the first page of God’s Mercy we meet a first-person narrator who remains with us almost throughout the entire trilogy. She is a six-year-old Sami child, eventually adopted by the midwife who is the protagonist of the first volume, and whose grandchild becomes the protagonist of the third. Ekman’s language is captivating, as is the tale itself.
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 Saga of Gösta Berling
Translator: Paul Norlen
Author: Selma Lagerlöf
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Year of Publication: 2009
A rousing classic by a Novel Prize-winning author
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.
Penwoman
Translator: Sarah Death
Author: Elin Wägner
Publisher: Norvik Press
Year of Publication: 2009
‘For the Hard Labour Gang, it was a summer like no other.’ This is a book that has won the heart of many Swedish readers. Penwoman’s youthful optimism is a perfect foil for the melancholy of her slightly older colleague Cecilia.
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!
The Dog
Translator: linda.schenck
Author: Kerstin Ekman
Publisher: Sphere
Year of Publication: 2009
This is the story of a dog, pure and simple. A puppy whose author knows dogs and life in the cold north of Sweden intimately, and who is able to make us feel present in it. The tale is also illustrated with touching woodcuts.
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.
Karlson on the Roof
Translator: Sarah Death
Author: Astrid Lindgren
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year of Publication: 2008
Part imaginary friend, part infuriating nuisance, propellor-powered Karlson is never boring to have around!
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.
