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.

Fredrika Bremer was a nineteenth-century writing sensation, her bestselling novels and travel books instantly translated into a range of other European languages. This early work shows she was never afraid to abandon the prevailing conventions of insipid romantic fiction to explore the social and moral problems facing women. This novel also has one of the most interesting narrators one could wish to meet: the plain-speaking but perceptive housekeeper Beata Hvardagslag, called back to the family to cook up a solution to their problems, Metaphors of kitchen and household abound in her astonishingly modern, metacritical approach to storytelling.

Mirjam Tuominen was a major poet and short story writer, as well as a distinguished essayist, translator and artist. Her work progressed through traditional prose, modernist poetry and abstract painting to Roman Catholic mysticism. She is one of the trio of great Nordic women poets, along with Edith Södergran and Karin Boye – all three published in English by Bloodaxe Books.

Her stories are often about love’s intensity, its eroticism and tenderness, about jealousy and struggles for power between men and women. They are acute in their depiction of small town life in Finland in the 1940s, and in capturing her sense of dread at the alarming upsurge of Nazi sympathies during the War. Everything she wrote afterwards was scarred by the horror of the Holocaust, and in particular by one news story of a German soldier who threw a Jewish boy into a sewer because the boy cried when the soldier was whipping his mother. Tuominen had a frightening, self-destructive ability to react directly to the suffering of others, and much of her poetry can be traced back to her anguished response to this one incident. Her poems are obsessive in confronting guilt, vulnerability and power, in their searching for absolute truth in a world she saw as split between victims and tormentors.

Tuominen was drawn to writers who were vulnerable and tormented outsiders. She translated their work, and wrote powerful studies of figures such as Kafka, Rilke, Proust, Hölderlin and Cora Sandel. Her essays shows the extent of her identification with them: ‘Kafka must have felt the conflict between the demands of his inner being and those of the world around him with an extreme and almost intolerable intensity.’

David McDuff’s edition includes selections from Mirjam Tuominen’s poetry and stories, as well as her seminal essay Victim and Tormentor. The book is introduced by her daughter, the writer Tuva Korsström.

Karin Boye is one of the most distinguished poets of modern Swedish literature. Her poetry is naturally mystical and possesses great intellectual clarity, containing both ‘the softness of the flower and the brittle toughness of the ice-crystal’. — Lauri Viljanen

The Cool Day (1961), The Courtyard (1969) and Years Like Leaves (1989) are combined in Homecoming, translated by David McDuff, who also translated Carpelan’s classic novel Axel (Carcanet, 1989; Paladin, 1990). The Courtyard poems are enriched with memories of his 1930s childhood in Helsingfors, the verse rooted in a specific place and time.