Eleanor lives with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize a familiar person’s face. It causes stress. Acute anxiety.

It can make you question what you think you know.

When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother, Vivianne’s, murder, she came face to face with the killer—a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, the horror of having come so close to a murderer—and not knowing if they’d be back—overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality.

Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house—a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died, suddenly. A place that has housed a chilling past for over fifty years.

Eleanor. Her steadfast boyfriend, Sebastian. Her reckless aunt, Veronika. The lawyer. All will go to this house of secrets, looking for answers. But as they get closer to uncovering the truth, they’ll wish they had never come to disturb what rests there.

‘What does Sara Nowak know?’

This is the last question priest Jürgen Stiller is asked before he is executed by ex-terrorist Faust. Then the killer begins the hunt for Sara Nowak.

Sara is fully occupied by the ongoing chaos in her personal life and she has no idea that she is being targeted until she is fired upon in her own home. The trail leads back to West Germany and a string of small, radical cells of terrorist fanatics. What was Operation Wahasha? Who is hiding behind the codename Faust? Sara Nowak has little to go on and meantime Faust is getting ever closer…

“Lena Andersson’s epic novel moves through a century of Scandinavian idealism like a winter storm. Son of Svea opens with the founding of social democracy, roars on through the rise of the welfare state and the murder of Olof Palme, and reaches an icy end in the ex-utopian Stockholm suburbs. Lena Andersson has an unparalleled eye for how ideology and family life interweave, turning the myths of modernism into something warmer and more intimate. Andersson’s novel is a powerful ode to the humble people who gave Scandinavia the one thing America misses most of all: upward mobility that is more than just a dream.” —Mikkel Rosengaard, author of The Invention of Ana

“Intellectual, agile, sharp, occasionally uncomfortable, always uncompromising, Son of Svea is a novel about modern Sweden from our most important voice, Lena Andersson. Her crystal-clear prose shapes Son of Svea into an absolute gem of a book.” —David Lagercrantz, #1 bestselling author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Cecilia, a young Swedish woman, has disappeared from the Baltic island where she grew up. An old friend claims to have seen her in a park in Lisbon. Tangled relationships in a small island community emerge when retired detective inspector Ann Lindell hears about this, and decides to investigate.

First, the government instituted no restrictions. Then, it didn’t order the wearing of face masks. While the rest of the world looked on with incredulity, condemnation, admiration, and even envy, a small country in Northern Europe stood alone. As COVID-19 spread across the globe rapidly, the world shut down. But Sweden remained open.

The Swedish COVID-19 strategy was alternately lauded and held up as a cautionary tale by international governments and journalists alike — with all eyes on what has been dubbed ‘The Swedish Experiment’. But what made Sweden take such a different path?

In The Herd, journalist Johan Anderberg narrates the improbable story of a small nation that took a startlingly different approach to fighting the virus, guiding the reader through the history of epidemiology and the ticking-clock decisions that pandemic decision-makers were faced with on a daily basis.

‘In his fine book The Herd, the Swedish journalist Johan Anderberg has chronicled the development of the Swedish policy and how tough it was for its architect, Anders Tegnell, to stay the course as country after country was stampeded into compulsory and comprehensive lockdowns.’
MATT RIDLEY, THE TELEGRAPH

‘A gripping analysis of the Swedish response, which examines how tensions between science, policy and politics heightened as the virus held on. If any book were capable of turning scientific debate into a thriller, this one does so; and for the armchair experts on COVID-19 that many of us have become, it is a must-read.’
FRIEDA KLOTZ, SUNDAY INDEPENDENT