The Wednesday Club
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Kjell Westö
Publisher: Maclehose Press
Year of Publication: 2016
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Kjell Westö
Publisher: Maclehose Press
Year of Publication: 2016
Translator: Annie Prime
Author: Ulf Stark, Linda Bondestam
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Press
Year of Publication: 2018
One of World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2018.
Ulf Stark and Linda Bondestam’s sweetly eccentric children’s picture book My Little Small tells the story of a creature who lives alone in a cave until she befriends a sun spark.
Translator: Saskia Vogel
Author: Per Molander
Publisher: Melville House
Year of Publication: 2016
From a country with one of the world’s lowest rates of income and social imbalance, award-winning Swedish analyst Per Molander’s book changes the conversation about the causes and effects of inequality.
Virtually all human societies are marked by inequality, at a level that surpasses what could be expected from normal differences in individuals capabilities alone. So begins this new approach to the greatest social ill of our time, and nearly every other era.
Translator: Sarah Death
Author: Selma Lagerlöf
Publisher: Norvik Press
Year of Publication: 2016
Once they were ready at around half-past seven, their beds hastily made, a tray would be sent up from the kitchen bearing bowls of oatmeal with cream piped on top and some big open-sandwiches made with home-baked crispbread.
There is sadness and joy, security and affection, loss and tribulation and generally never a dull moment for Selma and her siblings growing up at Mårbacka. Named after the author’s beloved childhood home and first published in 1922, this book is the first part of a notionally autobiographical trilogy and an enchanting, in many ways surprising text. It can be read as many things; memoir, autofiction, even part of Lagerlöf’s myth-making about her own successful writing career. It is part folklore, part social and family history, part mischievous satire in the guise of an innocent child’s-eye narrative, part declaration of a daughter’s love for a fallible father. A medley of anecdotes and a kaleidoscope of local characters sweep the book along to its culmination in a huge, glorious, valedictory summer night’s birthday party.
Translator: Deborah Bragan-Turner
Author: Sara Stridsberg
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Year of Publication: 2016
“I’ll put my head in the oven so you know where I am,” he whispers, kissing her neck.
Jim has attempted suicide several times. During his incarceration at the Beckomberga hospital for the mentally unstable, he voices his determination to succeed. Some day soon, he tells his daughter – as he has earlier told his mother and his wife – he will swallow sixty tablets, help them down with a bottle of whisky, and swim impossibly far out into the Atlantic.
The Gravity of Love shows how close nightmare can be to normality, and how relationships can briefly light up the lives of people wanting to end it all.
An intensely poetic novel set in and around Beckomberga hospital, near Stockholm. By the middle of the 20th century it was one of Europe’s largest psychiatric institutions.
Translator: Deborah Bragan-Turner
Author: Per Olov Enquist
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Year of Publication: 2016
“The love that dare not speak its name . . .”
Sweden, 1949. A boy of 15 chances upon a woman of 51. What ensues is cataclysmic, life-altering. All the more because it cannot be spoken of.
Looking back in late old age at an encounter that transformed him suddenly yet utterly, P.O. Enquist, a titan of Swedish letters, “comes out” – but in ways entirely novel and unexpected.
Enquist died in 2020. The book he had always seen as the one he could not write was to be his last.
Runner up in the Bernard Shaw Prize for Swedish Translation 2018.
Translator: Alice Menzies
Author: Fredrik Backman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Year of Publication: 2016
“an exquisitely moving portrait of an elderly man’s struggle to hold on to his most precious memories, and his family’s efforts to care for him even as they must find a way to let go.”
Translator: Sarah Death
Author: Göran Rosenberg
Publisher: Granta
Year of Publication: 2015
This shattering memoir movingly depicts Rosenberg’s father’s attempt to survive the aftermath of Auschwitz in a small industrial town in Sweden.
In 1947 a young man gets off a train in a small Swedish town. He has survived the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz, and the slave camps and transports during the final months of Nazi Germany. Now he has to learn to live with his memories. Göran Rosenberg returns to his own childhood in order to tell his father’s story. It is also the story of the chasm that soon opens between the world of the child, suffused with the optimism, progress and collective oblivion of post-war Sweden, and the world of the father, haunted by the shadows of the past.
Translator: Saskia Vogel
Author: Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman
Publisher: House of Anansi
Year of Publication: 2015
Magnus Bärtås and Fredrik Ekman create a mosaic of North Korea, past and present.
From the Japanese occupation to the demarcation of the border at the 38th parallel and the Korean War, the development of North Korean Juche ideology, the establishment of the Kim dynasty’s cult of personality, and the aggressive manufacturing of political propaganda, which motivated the kidnapping of South Korea’s most famous film couple.
Translator: linda.schenck
Author: Annika Thor
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Year of Publication: 2015
With complications in her life beyond those of any gifted, attractive adolescent girl, sixteen-year-old Stephie battles with the organization in Sweden that can provide financial aid for refugee children but which had not counted on the need to subsidize the many years of schooling needed for a gifted young woman to complete a full education. There is also the problem of her five-year younger sister, who wants nothing more than to become an “ordinary” Sweden, and the matter of their parents in Austria, where the war is still in full course.
In this third volume of the Faraway Island tetralogy, Stephie is sixteen, thriving at school in the big city, and rooming with her close friend Maj and Maj’s parents and numerous brothers and sisters. But life, as always, contains unforeseen complications.
Translator: Deborah Bragan-Turner
Author: Lars Gustafsson and Agneta Blomqvist
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Year of Publication: 2015
Through interwoven journeys taken together and apart, two voices become one guide.
Two lifetimes of exploration lie at the heart of Smile of the Midsummer Night.
Lars Gustafsson and Agneta Blomqvist present a very personal guide to their Swedish homeland. Their journey takes them from the farms of Skåne to the wilds of Lapland.
Translator: Saskia Vogel
Author: Katrine Marcal
Publisher: Portobello Books
Year of Publication: 2015
When Adam Smith wrote that all our actions stem from self-interest and the world turns because of financial gain he brought to life ‘economic man’. Selfish and cynical, economic man has dominated our thinking ever since and his influence has spread from the market to how we shop, work and date. But every night Adam Smith’s mother served him his dinner, not out of self-interest but out of love.
Today, our economics focuses on self-interest and excludes all other motivations. It disregards the unpaid work of mothering, caring, cleaning and cooking. It insists that if women are paid less, then that’s because their labour is worth less – how could it be otherwise? Economics has told us a story about how the world works and we have swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. Now it’s time to change the story. In this courageous look at the mess we’re in, Katrine Marcal tackles the biggest myth of our time and invites us to kick out economic man once and for all.
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Lars Kepler
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year of Publication: 2015
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Jonas Karlsson
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Year of Publication: 2015
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Mons Kallentoft
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Year of Publication: 2015
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Anders de la Motte
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year of Publication: 2015
Translator: Neil Smith
Author: Alexander Söderberg
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Year of Publication: 2015
Translator: Alice Menzies
Author: Katarina Bivald
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Year of Publication: 2015
New York Times Bestseller
Sara has never left Sweden but at the age of 28 she decides it’s time. She cashes in her savings, packs a suitcase full of books and sets off for Broken Wheel, Iowa, a town where she knows nobody.
Sara quickly realises that Broken Wheel is in desperate need of some adventure, a dose of self-help and perhaps a little romance, too. In short, this is a town in need of a bookshop.
With a little help from the locals, Sara sets up Broken Wheel’s first bookstore. The shop might be a little quirky but then again, so is Sara. And as Broken Wheel’s story begins to take shape, there are some surprises in store for Sara too…
Translator: Saskia Vogel
Author: Rut Hillarp
Publisher: Readux Books
Year of Publication: 2015
By Sweden’s great modernist eroticist.
The Black Curve is the story of a love affair.
Translator: Sarah Death
Author: Lena Andersson
Publisher: Picador
Year of Publication: 2015
On the day Ester Nilsson, writer and scholar, a sensible person in a sensible relationship, meets renowned artist Hugo Rask, her rational world begins to unravel.
Ester Nilsson is a sharp, honest, self-disciplined essayist – until she meets self-centred artist Hugo Rask. Julie Myerson captures the flavour of the book in her Guardian review: ‘Love, famously, is blind. People in love can lose even the most basic critical faculties and become capable of monumental self-deception. Hardly a new story, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this particular myopia as astutely and entertainingly explored as in this stunning novel […] All Ester wants is for Rask to return her feelings, to love her back, to claim her. But when she takes his hand in public it squirms “like a captured maggot, trying to extract itself from hers without making it too obvious”. You want to shout, “Don’t waste another moment with this man!” We’ve all been there – we’ve all been Ester. Your cheeks burn for her, but they also burn for yourself.’
An excruciatingly true and funny novel, a delight and a challenge to translate.
Translator: Deborah Bragan-Turner
Author: Per Olov Enquist
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Year of Publication: 2015
“When everything began so well, how could it turn out so badly?”
In this frank autobiographical novel P. O. Enquist narrates every last detail as if he were merely a character in the eventful and perplexing drama of his own life.
Translator: David McDuff
Author: Tua Forsström
Publisher: Bloodaxe
Year of Publication: 2015
‘This book-length poem by the celebrated Finnish-Swedish poet evokes a wintry landscape where we follow “one another’s tracks through the heart, the snow”. A parallel text allows Anglophone readers to follow Forsström’s light-footed, melancholic free verse in the original, guided by David McDuff’s delicate translation.’ – Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times
One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake was Forsström’s first new collection after her celebrated trilogy, I studied once at a wonderful faculty, published by Bloodaxe in 2006. As Sweden’s August Prize jury commented, this is poetry ‘both melancholy and impassioned’, expressing a ‘struggle against meaninglessness, disintegration, destruction – against death in life’.
‘This book-length poem by the celebrated Finnish-Swedish poet evokes a wintry landscape where we follow “one another’s tracks through the heart, the snow”. A parallel text allows Anglophone readers to follow Forsström’s light-footed, melancholic free verse in the original, guided by David McDuff’s delicate translation.’ – Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sunday Times
‘…One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake is a sequence that may be read as one silence-punctuated extended poem. Water, fishes, stars, glitter, dust, rain, wolves, hares: these are among the leitmotifs, and have literal and metaphorical resonance. The natural world intersects at every turn with the moral world, and is intrinsic to Forsström’s love poems and elegies.’ – Carol Rumens, online Poem of the Week, Guardian
Translator: HeLena Hoerberg
Author: Percy Barnevik
Publisher: Sanoma Utbildning AB, Stockholm
Year of Publication: 2014
A powerful and humorous collection of business wisdoms for anyone with aspirations to succeed as leader or indeed anyone who’s a fan of the formidable Percy Barnevik.
Percy Barnevik on Leadership is the translation of this iconic Swedish business leader’s management bible, Ledarskap, from Swedish into English. Leadership is Dr Barnevik’s compilation of advice and ancecdotes gained in his 50-year long career leading and growing large global corporates such as ABB, Skanska, Astra Zeneca, General Motors and DuPont.
The easily-read and user-friendly book is divided into 200 topics or lessons covering the importance of execution, the lesser need for strategy, the investigation trap, the right to make mistakes, delegating upwards, the elimination of meetings to the handling of crises, and everything in-between.
“ON leadership is one of the best books I have read for many years on Leadership, strategy change and little tit bits for a person who is so busy that sitting down for a 4 hour read has to have an outcome. It is broken down into sound-bytes and one of my favourites is 185 Be Yourself.” Seonaid Mackenzie
“Wonderful book by a world-class business leader.” Robert McTamaney