The Swedish reviews are in for THE TEMPEST

Steve Sem-Sandberg‘s new novel The Tempest received wonderful reviews in Swedish press yesterday. Read the full review by clicking each quote.

To catch sight of oneself, learn about one’s own history, challenges the established picture, the Story – this is The Tempest. Steve Sem-Sandberg weaves together these fragments like one of the true greats. We see the historical events – here in Norway during the Second World War and its aftermath – but we also see the wounds and grief the Story has left the individual with./…/
Steve Sem-Sandberg has written a suggestive and layered novel, told through a crystal clear narrative that immediately wins over the reader. The story is detailed, we can feel and smell it, we are present, in the moment. It was a long time since I disappeared so unreservedly into a novel’s intensity./…/
When love and power wants to be utopian, it turns evil. An address to our time that should be taken most seriously
Stefan Eklund, Dagens Nyheter

It might be that “The Tempest” is read as a way station between the bigger books, a smaller tale in the great swell of history, doubly so. That would indeed just reassert how these types of novels, written in the periphery of a great authorship, can be the ones to shine brightest and most uniquely. ”The Tempest” is, in a way, just that book. A small masterpiece, that can be read as poetry.
Hanna Nordenhök, Expressen

Steve Sem-Sanberg moves closer to the present with his latest novel. But mankind’s darkness remains unchanged, and his portrayal of it is masterful./…/
After all, Sem-Sandberg’s design is undeniable, the way he describes a passing aircraft or, even better, a crisp rain or a translucent dawn. It is the poetical drama of theses phenomena that creates a lingering, saturated read, as it is when you read something really beautiful.
Elisabeth Hjorth, Sydsvenskan

Steve Sem-Sandberg is one of those authors you can count on, a stylist of rank, a kind of Prospero in his own right with mastery of intrigue, characters and plots twists. He writes with such natural feeling and authority that one doesn’t have to worry in the least, one can just lean back and ride along while the author carefully portions out his sad tale and describes bombs that move “down along the sky like cross stitches in a tapestry”. “The Tempest” is about things that are handed down from person to person through the generations, and his prose is adapted for just such a leisurely course of events. /…/ this is a competent and solid novel that is simultaneously beautiful and strangely relaxing. Shakespeare’s play echoes and vibrates through the pages without ever making too much of a fuss. The result is a tale that both shimmers and threatens. That’s what a Prospero writes.
Josefin Holmström, Svenska Dagbladet

The story of Andreas Lehman’s complex relationship with his sister, which is exposed in a feverish, fragmentary, backwards way in Sem-Sandberg’s prose, rightly described as hypnotic .
Björn Werner, Ystads Allehanda