Archive for category: Feature

Nordin Agency congratulates Andrzej Tichý and Therese Bohman, both of which have been nominated for the August Prize 2016. Their novels Wretchedness (Eländet) and Eventide (Aftonland) represent the best in Swedish contemporary fiction.

Eventide is Therese Bohman’s third novel. Through serene prose, Bohman tells the story of an art professor who is looking for freedom, but only seems to find loneliness. An ideological novel where our protagonist is trying to find a way to be her own individual without adjusting to anyone else’s ideals.

The jury’s motivation for Eventide:
“The night is closing in over Stockholm and it’s late at Frescati. Karolina is a newly separated art professor supervising a student with a sensational approach to a female symbolist. She uses sex, wine and decadent art to move between the contemporaries whose company she is unhappy with. Her class trip has reinforced her loneliness and the sweetness of revenge is all that remains. Therese Bohman has written a perceptive novel of ideas, it’s delicate and seemingly digestible.”

Through Wretchedness, Andrzej Tichý tells a visceral and urgent story about a young cellist forced to confront suppressed memories of his upbringing in the suburbs of Malmö. His experimental prose and beautiful character depiction enhance the political undertone of this brilliant novel.

The jury’s motivation for Wretchedness:
“One morning a young cellist meets himself – or someone he could have been – in the form of a beggar. From a repressed past rises a flow of voices, which testifies to vulnerability, abuse and violence. What should survivors do with their history? Can you be in solidarity with the friends you left behind? Andrzej Tichý depicts a miserable reality in a hard-hitting form. His polyphonic novel has a hard, rhythmic language and an inexorable fury.”

Congratulations to both of these extremely talented authors!

The August Prize is named after the famous Swedish author August Strindberg, and is one of the most celebrated and prestigious literary prizes in Sweden.

Founded by the Swedish Publishers’ Association in 1989, the intention was to institute an annual award for the best Swedish books of the year in order to increase public interest in Swedish contemporary literature. The August Prize is awarded in three categories: Best Swedish Fiction Book of the Year, Best Swedish Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and Best Swedish Children’s Book of the Year.

“’The Elephant’s Foot is a beautiful, lingering novel: the plot is simple but the prose is intense and full of images.”
Josefin Holmström, Svenska Dagbladet

Hessérus, a graduate in Medicine from Uppsala University and a trained dancer from the Swedish Royal Ballet School, started out as a dramatist and wrote several plays for radio, television and the stage. However, it was her two collections of short stories, Not as Beautiful as in Valparaíso and The Dead Queen that introduced her original and graceful style of writing to a wider audience. Since then her novels To Isola and The City Without Women has enthralled readers with their visionary and multi-faceted stories, poetic narratives and  sharp criticism of modern urban life.

Her third novel, The Elephant’s Foot, was published in March 2016 marking the 25th anniversary of the disaster in Chernobyl. In it, we follow young, Swedish, biologist Katarina as she faces the perilous nature of the forbidden zone while navigating the politics of a small international team of scientists.

Scientific accuracy is pitted against irrationality, sense against sensibility. Madeleine Hessérus writes about love and human kind’s complex relationship with civilisation and nature in a lucid, eloquent prose.

”I read the book slowly to prolong the pleasure of the novel’s suggestive description of the scientists’ surprisingly passionate existences. Patiently gathering data, aloofness and envy, the irrational disgruntlement /… / Hessérus’ portrayal of the scientists’ expeditions into the zone is a literary achievement. The prose wriggles and almost spills out of the pages in the same way that the trees pierce through abandoned buildings in the real-life town of Pripyat / … / ‘The Elephant’s Foot’ is an oil painting disguised as a novel.”
Inga-Lina Lindqvist, Aftonbladet

”The writing in Madeleine Hessérus’ ‘The Elephant’s Foot’ is startlingly beautiful when she describes how nature is reclaiming the zone, the sealed off area around Chernobyl’s quarantined nuclear power plant.”Milena Bergquist, Femina

“She has that remarkable gift for storytelling that is so hard to define and which is fundamental to the appetite for commercial fiction: something that she rarely receives enough praise for.”
Dagens Nyheter

It is January and Fjällbacka is bitterly cold. A half-naked girl is drifting through the snowy forest, out onto a road. The car appears out of nowhere and does not have time to swerve.

When Patrik Hedström and his team receive the alarm about the accident, the girl has already been identified. She disappeared four months earlier on her way home from the local riding school and has not been seen since. Her body bears the signs of unimaginable atrocities and there is a chance that she will not be the last and only victim.

At the same time, Erica Falck is investigating an old family tragedy that led to a man’s death. She pays countless visits to his wife, who was convicted of the murder, without being able to find out what really happened. What is she hiding? Erica suspects there is something wrong. And it appears that the past is casting a shadow over the present.

The latest novel in Camilla Läckberg‘s internationally successful Fjällbacka Series is out and The Lion Tamerhas already gotten rave reviews.

It has been seven years since Mons Kallentoft first introduced himself as one of the most striking new voices in Scandinavian crime fiction in conjunction with the launch of Midwinter Sacrifice (Midvinterblod) – the first book in the successful Malin Fors series. Last year, Kallentoft announced that he was working on a new project together with fellow writer Markus Lutteman, and in June 2014, the readers became acquainted with Zack for the first time.

Mons Kallentoft had been nurturing the idea for several years – to write a series of crime novels loosely inspired by the Hercules myth, but based in 21st century Stockholm. He met Markus Lutteman at an awards ceremony and the pair immediately connected. Together they created the complex young Detective Inspector Zack Herry and his fictional universe: the dark, sinister underbelly of contemporary Stockholm. Their plan is to write twelve books – just like the twelve labours of Hercules.

The first title, Zack, was published by new, innovative publishing house Bookmark in June 2014 and it was not long before the book was top of the charts. The readers have described the book as “modern”, “captivating” and “action-packed”. International rights have been sold to nine territories, including France and the USA.

But fans of Malin Fors do not need to worry. The eighth book in the series, Earth Storm (Jordstorm), will be published at the end of this month and Kallentoft has an outline for another five books about the troubled Linköping detective.