Like The Emperor of Lies that came before it, The Chosen Ones is a polyphonic story, located between the historical and the fictitious. Steve Sem-Sandberg takes us so close to the children that were sacrificed for the Nazi ideology of preserving the Aryan race. This very strong novel rests heavily on thorough and rigorous research work. Through brilliant writing, the author makes us live through the same story as his characters while witnessing the atrocities of the treatments they had to endure. This moving book is for reading and never forgetting. Nobody can come out unscathed after reading this novel that honours the children tortured during the Second World War.
– Rédaction Viabooks, Nomination

A harrowing chronicle.
– Booklist

The novel’s horror is not merely that the crimes it relates are true, but the way the most unspeakable atrocities can be committed by the state under the guise of science. With a gift for finding humanity in even the darkest of stories, Sem-Sandberg has written an indelible, moving novel.
– Publishers Weekly

Making every word count, Sem-Sandberg explores the psychologies of captive and captor, the complexities of bearing witness to things that most people would sooner forget. A memorable meditation on the human capacity to do ill – and to endure.
– Kirkus Reviews

You don’t so much read Sem-Sandberg as stand in the fiery wind of his prose. He makes his reader strangely complicit in his terrible subjects. He does not offer that tattered lifebelt of “redemption” so often thrown to the modern reader, nor much space to rest your reading eyes; but his books are only merciless because the great swaths of human enterprise they chart are themselves merciless. […] Some novels are described as dark, in order to alert the reader. But this novel, translated into English by Anna Paterson, is as bright as a cloudless June sky under which, behind walls and doors, we go about our inexplicable human business.
– The Guardian

The Chosen Ones is meticulously researched and laden with history but such is Sem-Sandberg’s skill that it does not feel this way: he jumps between his characters and weaves the historical details into their conversations, thoughts and actions. It’s an education but do not approach this book lightly. This is historical fiction at its most raw and disturbing.
– The Times

Steve Sem-Sandberg does not write so that we may reconcile with the past, but so that we may understand the unforgivable.
– SVT Babel

Some books create a world in which you want to stay forever and others create one so painful that you are prepared to do almost anything to escape the reading all the while getting sucked in by a forceful necessity. Steve Sem-Sandberg’s novels belong in both the former and the latter category. That is usually the case with great literature. […] What might be the most beautiful thing about books like these, that each make out a particular world of their own, is how they all make use of a kind of anti-totalitarian form of writing, almost as if they want to offer resistance against the violence they portray – partly because of the kaleidoscopic montage technique that defeats every uniform and absolute claim on history. But also because they always seem to search for that trembling point in every person where she can be understood as both victim and perpetrator.
– Expressen

The Chosen Ones is rich in drama and people who are portrayed with great empathy, sympathy and humanity. It’s a novel with a proper drive.
– NRK

[Sem-Sandberg] has coloured the facts, to give a voice to the voiceless victims of history. In this he has succeeded brilliantly. He portrays the hard lives of children who were doomed in advance because of their ethnicity and health. Sem-Sandberg’s detailed account of life in this closed Nazi microcosm is a chilling monument.
– Trouw

Reading this book will have you gasping for breath every time you put down the book and look at your child or grandchild.
– Dagblad de Limburger

Sem-Sandberg succeeds in being both masterfully careful and extremely intrusive when he creates this world that doesn’t leave the reader unmoved for one second.
– De Morgen

Claustrophobic, hard and barely tolerable, but always compelling and never over-emotional – an equally impressive as brave monument against forgetfulness, injustice and eternal death.
– The Standard

The old truth about reality being stranger and more horrible than fiction comes into force in Steve Sem-Sandberg’s new documentary novel. What makes The Chosen Ones great – besides its literary qualities – is its expansion of the history we already know.
– Morgenbladet

An intelligent and precise rendering of the circumstances in which political conditions make us both victims and perpetrators.
– Dagsavisen

A text that at its best succeeds in bringing the reader closer to the essence of Nazism than any other fictional work I can ever remember reading – lets say – Sebald’s Austerlitz. That is an impressive feat.
– Klassekampen

The Chosen Ones is, despite the programmatic in the book, an achievement that also impresses with its compassionate portrayal of people on all sides. Even the many children are clear characters.
– Aftenposten

Sem-Sandberg’s story has both a striking breadth and depth, and you carry several of his characters with you a long time after finishing the book. He portrays them all with a detailed poignancy and understanding, patients as well as staff and the institution management. And they are not the only ones, in similar fashion he breathes life into the place, the time and the atmosphere. The reader is transported to Vienna before, during and after the war.
– Sydsvenska Dagbladet

A master in the art of empathy. […] Because what this novel manages to achieve in the first 550 pages is to capture the reader in a vise of merciless credibility, where the author’s empathy for the most crippling pain, the most bottomless humiliation, the most chaotic helplessness calls out a despair and a powerless anger that makes our cozy living room walls vibrate with shame and guilt, 70 years later.
– Dagens Nyheter

Steve Sem-Sandberg’s novel has an impressive weight, a documentary and absolute thoroughness that never falls into the pit of archive boredom but maintains its human appeal.
– Norrbottens-Kuriren, Hudiksvalls Tidning

The mechanics that Sem-Sandberg uncovers with precision and terrifying concretisation is nothing short of a literary feat of strength and that on an international level. […] The Chosen Ones is simply a masterpiece that nobody should abstain from reading.
– Helsingborgs Dagblad

It should be without a doubt that Sem-Sandberg (Carl-Henning Wijkmark must excuse me) is Sweden’s foremost interpreter of a past and present Europe. Kant’s ethics – duty above all – is punctuated here. Punctuated and perverted.
– Borås Tidning

Steve Sem-Sandberg preforms a memory work with vast gravity and admirable warmth. He even succeeds in getting the reader to touch lightly on an understanding of the mentally switched off Head nurse.
– Arbetarbladet