12 books
Anna Brones
Fika started as slang — Swedes flipped the syllables of kaffe and got fika. It’s a coffee break, but calling it that undersells it. It happens once or twice a day, everywhere, at every workplace, and it’s a verb: You…
Tove Jansson
For twenty-six years, Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent summers on a bare platter of rock in the Gulf of Finland, a tiny speck called Klovharun, living their dream of art and isolation. Her…
Solvej Balle
Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer, wakes up and it is the eighteenth of November. It is the eighteenth of November again the next day, and the next, and it doesn’t stop. She isn’t looking for a way out and…
James Rebanks
Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd who wrote The Shepherd’s Life, went to a bare island off the coast of northern Norway for a season to work with a woman named Anna in her seventies — one of the last of…
Peter Høeg
A six-year-old Greenlandic boy falls off a Copenhagen rooftop and the police call it an accident. Smilla Jaspersen, half Inuit, half Danish, a glaciologist who fits nowhere and likes nobody, looks at the tracks in the snow on that roof…
Patrik Svensson
Who knew there could be an international bestseller all about eels? Turns out, as Patrik Svensson writes, quite a few knew. Centuries of leading thinkers—Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Rachel Carson—have been captivated by eels and their mysterious life…
Margareta Magnusson
Marie Kondo pushed me, and Magnusson made me jump—that and having to fill two Dumpsters with junk when my dad died. Döstädning is a real Swedish word and a real practice: Going through your things while you’re still able, so…
Camilla Läckberg
A four-year-old girl goes missing near Fjällbacka, and the case is a mirror of one thirty years earlier, when two teenage girls confessed to killing a child and were later released. Both women are back in town. Detective Patrik Hedström…
Stieg Larsson
Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist just convicted of libel, gets hired by an aging industrialist to solve a forty-year-old disappearance on the family’s private island north of Stockholm. Working with him, eventually, is Lisbeth Salander — a researcher and hacker,…
Antti Tuomainen
Jaakko Kaunismaa runs a small matsutake mushroom export business in a Finnish town, shipping to Japan, and a doctor tells him he’s been systematically poisoned and has weeks left. So he sets out to find out who’s killing him, which…
Nathaniel Ian Miller
As a young boy in Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century, bookworm Sven Ormson was obsessed with polar adventure, but decades of lethargy and dead-end jobs have led to a man who is, at best, stuck. Spurred by…
Anu Partanen
Partanen moved from Finland to New York, married an American, and found herself suddenly anxious in ways she never had been — about health insurance, about childcare, about student debt, about what happens if a job ends. Her argument is…
