Gentlemen


Klas Östergren - 1980
    The two friends led the high-life in Stockholm until the day Henry’s younger brother Leo – a star poet, drunk, political provocateur – showed up. Leo drags them into a scandal involving illegal weapons and gangsters, and soon the three men find themselves unwittingly and irreversibly trapped in a dangerous plot.Written with an intense regard for storytelling and style, Gentlemen is the most important literary work to emerge from Sweden in the past thirty years – simultaneously celebrating and mourning the post-WWII era with its jazz music, poetry, hidden treasures, and espionage.

Fräulein Else


Arthur Schnitzler - 1924
    This novel shows how the demands of her family force Else into the realization that everything has a price and morality has a most brittle veneer.

The Truth Behind the Lie


Sara Lövestam - 2015
    She finds a cryptic ad online for a private investigator:“Need help, but can’t contact the police?”That’s where Kouplan comes in. He’s an Iranian refugee living in hiding. He and his brother were forced to leave Iran after their involvement with a radical newspaper hated by the regime was discovered. Kouplan’s brother disappeared, and he hasn’t seen him in four years. He makes a living as a P.I. working under the radar, waiting for the day he can legally apply for asylum.Pernilla’s daughter has vanished without a trace, and Kouplan is an expert at living and working off the grid. He’s the perfect PI to help… but something in Pernilla’s story doesn’t add up. She might need help that he can’t offer...and a little girl’s life hangs in the balance.

The Swimmer


Joakim Zander - 2013
    And she has just seen something she shouldn’t: something people will kill to keep hidden. On the other side of the world, an old spy hides from his past. Once, he was a man of action: so dedicated to the cause that he abandoned his baby daughter to keep his cover. Now the only thing he lives for is swimming in the local pool. Then, on Christmas eve, Klara is thrown into a terrifying chase through Europe. Only the Swimmer can save her. But time is running out...

Felsteg


Maria Adolfsson - 2018
    A brutal murder. A secret hidden in the past . . .In the middle of the North Sea, between the UK and Denmark, lies the beautiful and rugged island nation of Doggerland.Detective Inspector Karen Eiken Hornby has returned to the main island, Heimö, after many years in London and has worked hard to become one of the few female police officers in Doggerland.So, when she wakes up in a hotel room next to her boss, Jounas Smeed, she knows she's made a big mistake. But things are about to get worse: later that day, Jounas's ex-wife is found brutally murdered. And Karen is the only one who can give him an alibi.The news sends shockwaves through the tight-knit island community, and with no leads and no obvious motive for the murder, Karen struggles to find the killer in a race against time.Soon she starts to suspect that the truth might lie in Doggerland's history. And the deeper she digs, the clearer it becomes that even small islands can hide deadly secrets . . .

Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories


Lauren Groff - 2009
    In "Blythe," an attorney who has become a stay-at-home mother takes a night class in poetry and meets another full-time mother, one whose charismatic brilliance changes everything. In "The Wife of the Dictator," that eponymous wife ("brought back . . . from [the dictator's] last visit to America") grows more desperately, menacingly isolated every day. In "Delicate Edible Birds," a group of war correspondents--a lone, high-spirited woman among them--falls sudden prey to a brutal farmer while fleeing Nazis in the French countryside. In "Lucky Chow Fun," Groff returns us to Templeton, the setting of her first book, for revelations about the darkness within even that idyllic small town. In some of these stories, enormous changes happen in an instant. In others, transformations occur across a lifetime--or several lifetimes. Throughout the collection, Groff displays particular and vivid preoccupations. Crime is a motif--sex crimes, a possible murder, crimes of the heart. Love troubles recur--they're in every story--love in alcoholism, in adultery, in a flood, even in the great flu epidemic of 1918. Some of the love has depths, which are understood too late; some of the love is shallow, and also understood too late. And mastery is a theme--Groff's women swim and baton twirl, become poets, or try and try again to achieve the inner strength to exercise personal freedom. Overall, these stories announce a notable new literary master. Dazzlingly original and confident, Delicate Edible Birds further solidifies Groff's reputation as one of the foremost talents of her generation.

The Legacy


Virginia Woolf - 1944
    Clandon," she said, looking straight at him for the first time, and for the first time he was struck by the expression, sympathetic yet searching, in her eyes. "If at any time," she continued, "there's anything I can do to help you, remember, I shall feel it, for your wife's sake, a pleasure..."With that she was gone. Her words and the look that went with them were unexpected. It was almost as if she believed, or hoped, that he would need her. When the prominent political Gilbert Clandon is forced to take care of the property after his wife's sudden death, he is faced with a legacy with unforeseen consequences.

Bliss


Katherine Mansfield - 1918
    It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror—but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something ... divine to happen ... that she knew must happen ... infallibly.

The Survivors


Alex Schulman - 2020
    There is Nils, the oldest, who couldn't escape his suffocating home soon enough, and Pierre, the youngest, easily bullied and quick to lash out. And then there is Benjamin, always the family's nerve center, perpetually on the look-out for triggers and trap doors in a volatile home where the children were left to fend for themselves, competing for their father's favor and their mother's elusive love.But as the years have unfolded, Benjamin has grown increasingly untethered from reality, frozen in place while life carries on around him. And between the brothers a dangerous current now vibrates. What really happened that summer day when everything was blown to pieces?In a thrillingly fast-paced narrative, The Survivors mixes the emotional acuity of Edward St Aubyn, the literary verve of Ian McEwan, and the heart of Shuggie Bain. By brilliantly dissecting a mind unravelling in the wake of tragedy, Alex Schulman reveals the ways in which our deepest loyalties leave us open to the greatest betrayals.

In Every Moment We Are Still Alive


Tom Malmquist - 2015
    even as his father is diagnosed with cancer.Reeling in grief, Tom finds himself wrestling with endless paperwork and indecipherable diagnoses, familial misunderstandings and utter exhaustion while trying simply to comfort his loved ones as they begin to recede from him.But slowly, amidst the pain and fury, arises a story of resilience and hope, particularly when Tom finds himself having to take responsibility for the greatest gift of them all, his newborn daughter.Written in an unforgettable style that dives deep into the chaos of grief and pain, yet also achieves a poetry that is inspiring, In Every Moment We Are Still Alive is slated to become one of the most stirring novels of the year.

Naïve. Super


Erlend Loe - 1996
    He writes lists, obsesses over the nature of time, and finds joy in bouncing balls--all in an effort to find out how best to live life. An utterly enchanting meditation on experience, Naive. Super was a #1 best-seller in Erlend Loe's native Norway.

The Secret Lives of People in Love


Simon Van Booy - 2007
    They stay with you like a significant memory.”—Roger Rosenblatt“Van Booy is a remarkable young writer. Taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, in spite of their evanescence, are frozen for a moment in these stories and celebrated, along with their subtle interconnection, in all the aspects of love.”—Fred VolkmerThe Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy’s themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.Born in London, Simon Van Booy grew up in Wales. A keen rugby player, he was recruited to play football for Campbellsville University in Kentucky. He eventually returned to England, where he graduated from Dartington College of Arts. Now a New Yorker, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and in the Bard College Clemente Course. As a freelance journalist, he writes for several New York newspapers. He has won a first-place award for in-depth reporting from the New York Press Association.

Echoes from the Dead


Johan Theorin - 2007
    Suddenly the island that once seemed so achingly familiar turns strange and dangerous… Until Julia finds herself facing truths she never imagined—about what really happened on that September day twenty years ago, about who may have crossed paths with little Jens in the fog, and how a child could truly vanish without a trace…until now.

The Road to Jerusalem


Jan Guillou - 1998
    THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM covers his childhood and education at the Cistercian monastry of Varnhem. There he is taught the best of spiritual and worldly learning, as well as being trained to become a master archer and swordsman by the giant Brother Guilbert, a former knight. At seventeen, equipped to become a monk or a warrior, Arn returns home, a young man and yet an innocent in the ways of the world. Two sisters cross his path: one seduces him, while with the other sister, Cecilia, he falls deeply in love. In loving two sisters he has committed a crime punishable by both civil and clerical authorities, and he is sentenced to serve 20 years as a Knight Templar in the Holy Land.

Agathe


Anne Cathrine Bomann - 2017