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.

Kerstin Ekman, one of the foremost living Swedish authors, began what became a tetralogy commonly referred to as Women in the City, with this volume in 1997. it opens in the 1870s, and follows the women of a small community as it grows, thanks to the advent of the railroad, among other changes.

His work is featured in David McDuff’s Finland-Swedish anthology Ice Around Our Lips: ‘Gösta Ågren is the real discovery: an Ostrobothnian quasi-separatist Marxist, he is heavily influenced by R.S. Thomas, but his taut, muscley, short lines remind me, too, of Edward Bond, prismed through a totally Finland-Swedish consciousness… Gösta Ågren has absorbed his modernist predecessors…tough, but compassionate… abstract and imagistic and sensual. He feels like a major poet.’ – Adam Thorpe, Poetry Review. A Valley in the Midst of Violence is based mainly on the collections Cloud Summer (Molnsommar, 1978), Poems in Black and White (Dikter i svartvitt, 1980), That Which Always Is (Det som alltid är, 1982), and The Other God (Den andre guden, 1985). The poems are grouped by Ågren in titled sections which refer to theme, and are not the titles of the original collections.