Codename Faust
Translator: Ian Giles
Author: Gustaf Skördeman
Publisher: Zaffre
Year of Publication: 2022
‘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. Gustaf Skördeman’s highly-anticipated sequel to Geiger.
‘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…
Son of Svea: A Tale of the People’s Home
Translator: Sarah Death
Author: Lena Andersson
Publisher: Other Press
Year of Publication: 2022
“This is the story of a twentieth-century Swede. A man without cracks but with a great split running through him, and in this he entirely resembled the society he populated and shaped.”
“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
Knock Knock
Translator: Elizabeth Clark Wessel
Author: Anders Roslund
Publisher: Putnam
Year of Publication: 2021
The #1 international-bestselling thriller that tells the electrifying story of a police inspector and a former criminal informant in a race against time as they attempt to unravel past and present secrets.
In Roslund’s heart-pounding fourth Grens and Hoffman novel (after 2019’s Three Hours with the late Börge Hellström), a break-in at the Stockholm apartment where every member of the Lilaj family, except five-year-old Zana, was killed 17 years earlier prompts Det. Supt. Ewert Grens to reexamine the case. Grens discovers that Zana’s witness protection file has disappeared from a secure police archive just as several criminals are murdered in the same manner as her family. Meanwhile, Piet Hoffman is contacted anonymously by a person who knows all about Hoffman’s time infiltrating Stockholm’s criminal underworld for the police. If Hoffman doesn’t start a gang war and thereby kick start demand for this new player in the weapons smuggling business, he and his family will be killed. Grens and Hoffman combine forces, as Grens senses they’re working two ends of the same problem. While the peril that Hoffman faces is palpable, Grens’s impending retirement and loss of purpose presents its own existential threat. This terrific mash-up of police procedural and crime thriller has strongly imagined characters, explosive action, and a twisty plot with an unexpected conclusion. It’s a must for Scandinavian noir fans.
–Publishers Weekly, starred review
Cry Wolf
Translator: Elizabeth Clark Wessel
Author: Hans Rosenfeld
Publisher: Hanover Square
Year of Publication: 2021
The first book in a new series by Hans Rosenfeldt, creator of the TV series The Bridge as well as Netflix’s Emmy Award–winning Marcella.
Rosenfeldt, creator of the TV series The Bridge, debuts with a fast-moving procedural set in Sweden’s remote north. The city of Haparanda has seen international trafficking, both legal and illicit, throughout its long history. When dead wolves are found with human remains in their bellies outside the city, policewoman Hannah Wester and her chief and lover, Gordon Niska, investigate. Hannah and Gordon soon have to look into a spiraling series of vicious drug-related crimes that may be related to atrocities committed by Katja, a sadistic hit woman sent by a Russian gang lord to retrieve 30 million kronor worth of drugs. Tormented by menopausal hot flashes, her own dark past, and a failing marriage, Hannah struggles through her anger at being female, as well as at Sweden’s swelling gang problem and its failing socialist policies. Rosenfeldt’s abrupt cinematic cuts and vivid bursts of violence keep the pages turning, despite the somewhat predictable plot. Haparanda, strikingly described in human terms (“she grew so fast she creaked”), is a character unto itself. This standalone is ready-made for TV.
– Publishers Weekly
The Deathwatch Beetle
Translator: Paul Norlen
Author: Kjell Eriksson
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Year of Publication: 2021
A young woman disappears from an island community. Retired detective inspector Ann Lindell wants to know why.
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.
The Herd: How Sweden chose its own path through the worst pandemic in 100 years
Translator: Alice E. Olsson
Author: Johan Anderberg
Publisher: Scribe
Year of Publication: 2022
A real-life thriller about a nation in crisis, and the controversial decisions its leaders made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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
The Antarctica of Love
Translator: Deborah Bragan-Turner
Author: Sara Stridsberg
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Year of Publication: 2021
The story of a young woman’s brief life, her brutal murder, and the world that moves on without her.
A devastating novel about absolute vulnerability, brutality and isolation, by Sara Stridsberg.
Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2023 and the National Translation Award in Prose 2023.
The Lonely Ones
Translator: Sarah Death
Author: Håkan Nesser
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Year of Publication: 2021
Group dynamics can create aching loneliness when there are dark secrets to be kept, even for the golden youth of Uppsala University. Fasten your seatbelts for DI Barbarotti’s intriguing fourth case.
In 1969, six very diverse young people in the old university city of Uppsala are embarking on their studies. Two are brother and a sister. Two are young men who have just done national service together. One is a class warrior, one a theology student, one a would-be entrepreneur, and one a a future journalist. There are two odd young people who may well be geniuses. The group’s lives become inextricably intertwined, but a summer trip through Eastern Europe changes everything, and when their time at university is over, it also signals the end of something else.
Years later, a lecturer at Lund University is found dead at the bottom of a cliff in the woods close to Kymlinge. And chillingly, it is the very same spot where one of the Uppsala students died thirty-five years before.