Scandinavian Fiction

Magic and myth inhabit these chapters in figures both familiar and strange. Giant trolls and talking animals are everywhere. The winds take human form. A one-eyed old woman might seem reminiscent of the Norse god Odin. We meet sly aunts, resourceful princesses, and devious robbers. These stories, set in Norway's majestic landscape of towering mountains and dense forests, are filled with humor, mischief, and sometimes surprisingly cruel twists of fate. All are rendered in the deceptively simple narrative style perfected by Asbjørnsen and Moe.

Born in 1150 to a noble Swedish family and coming of age at a monastery under the tutelage of a Cistercian monk and a former Knight Templar, young Arn Magnusson is sent to fulfill his destiny beyond the cloister walls. But the world awaiting him is a place at odds with his monastic ways. And when the murder of a king engulfs Western Götaland into a whirlwind of intrigue and ruthless power plays, headstrong and naive Arn is forced to leave the woman he loves behind and take up arms to battle infidels in the Holy Land.

The Bucket List starts when undercover FBI Agent John Adderley wakes up in a hospital bed in Baltimore with extensive gunshot wounds. He knows he’s lucky to be alive. And just a few beds away is the man who 24 hours ago pointed a gun to his head. Soon, a high-profile cold-case file is sent to Agent Adderley, now living in Sweden (where he’s not lived since he was a boy) in witness protection, hiding until he can testify against the drug cartel he infiltrated back in the States. Adderley is determined to solve the case, even with a price on his head....

The Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda are our oldest written sources for Norse mythology. When it comes to the norse myths, they are the closest thing we have to listening these stories as the vikings actually told them, around those ancient campfires so long ago. It is my hope that you will enjoy this collection, and that the two books will work in tandem to broaden and deepen your appreciation for these epic and mystical stories, and the enigmatic culture that spawned them.

A young boy wakes to find his mother missing. Their house is empty but outside in the garden he sees his mother's favourite scarf – wrapped around the neck of a snowman. As Harry Hole and his team begin their investigation they discover that an alarming number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years. When a second woman disappears it seems that Harry's worst suspicions are confirmed: for the first time in his career Harry finds himself confronted with a serial killer operating on his home turf.

On the day Stockholm police officer Hanna Ahlander’s personal and professional lives crash, she takes refuge at her sister’s lodge in the Swedish ski resort paradise of Åre. But it’s a brief comfort. The entire village is shaken by the sudden vanishing of a local teenage girl. Hanna can’t help but investigate, and while searching for the missing person, she lands a job with the local police department. There she joins forces with Detective Inspector Daniel Lindskog, who has been tasked with finding the girl. Their only lead: a scarf in the snow.

As the spring warmth melts the ice, divers search the wreckage at the bottom of the Ångermanland River - but the murdered man they recover was put there much more recently than the historic artefacts they were seeking. Local Detective Eira Sjödin, newly pregnant and not talking about it, is proud to be put in charge of the investigation - until she discovers the man's identity, and the evidence begins to point towards her own family.

A woman is found murdered after an Internet date. The marks left on her body show the police that they are dealing with a particularly vicious killer. Under pressure from the media to find the murderer, the force know there's only one man for the job. But Harry Hole is reluctant to return to the place that almost took everything from him. Until he starts to suspect a connection between this killing and his one failed case.

young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star – a pentagram, the devil’s star. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work. A wave of similar murders is on the horizon. An emerging pattern suggests that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands....

Mit 19 verließ Hanna Duncker die Insel Öland im Süden Schwedens. Damals wurde ihr Vater wegen Mordes und Brandstiftung verurteilt. Nie wieder wollte sie hierhin zurück. Seitdem sind 16 Jahre vergangen und nach dem Tod ihres Vaters zieht es sie nun plötzlich zurück. Kaum tritt sie ihren Dienst bei der Polizei von Kalmar an, wird ein Teenager erstochen aufgefunden: Das Kind ihrer besten Schulfreundin. Zusammen mit ihrem neuen Kollegen Erik Lindgren muss Hanna tiefer in ihre Vergangenheit eintauchen, als ihr lieb ist.

Even when the climate crisis escalates beyond our worst nightmares and people become refugees, the world keeps turning and life carries on as usual: teenaged love stories, marital collapses, identity crises and revolts against hopeless parents continue to play out. Through four inter-connected perspectives, Jens Liljestrand chronicles how the struggles of ordinary people go on even as the world as we know it is coming to an end.

A woman’s skeletal remains are excavated on an uninhabited island in Sandhamn’s archipelago, and Thomas Andreasson is called to officially investigate. But his best friend, Nora Linde, can’t help but get involved. On leave after her last case took a dark turn, Nora is tortured by depression, nightmares, and guilt. Her marriage fractured, her pride chipped away, Nora could find redemption in this investigation.

Iceland, 1956. Fifteen-year-old Lára spends the summer working for a couple on the small island of Videy, just off the coast of Reykjavík. In early August, the girl disappears without a trace. The mystery becomes Iceland's greatest unsolved case. What happened to the young girl? Is she still alive? Did she leave the island, or did something happen to her there? Thirty years later in August, 1986, as the city of Reykjavík celebrates its 200th anniversary, journalist Valur Robertsson begins his own investigation into Lara's case.

Four nuns and a fifth woman, a visitor to Africa, are killed in a savage nighttime attack. Months later in Sweden, the news of the unexplained tragedy sets off a cruel vengeance for these killings. Inspector Kurt Wallander is home from an idyllic holiday in Rome, full of energy and plans for the future. Autumn settles in, and Wallander prays the winter will be peaceful. But when he investigates the disappearance of an elderly birdwatcher, he discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder - a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case. But they couldn’t have been more wrong. When a 25-year-old woman is found dead in Stockholm, detective Vanessa Frank knows that there is more to the case than meets the eye. And when Vanessa finds herself on the trail of a dangerous internet community who call themselves "incels", her world starts to unravel. These ‘involuntarily celibate’ men have fostered hatred towards the women who turn them down, and now women are turning up dead.

Sandhamn Island’s archipelago is a beautiful place to visit. For a mother on the run, it’s the only place to hide in a novel of escalating suspense by Viveca Sten, bestselling author of Still Waters.

In einer Nacht, als ein heftiger Sturm über der malerischen schwedischen Westküste wütet, verschwindet die Lehrerin Agnes spurlos. Die Einwohner organisieren Suchtrupps, die Polizei ist unter der Leitung von Kommissarin Maria Martinsson vor Ort. Und auch ein neuer Bewohner taucht in dem verschlafenen Hovenäset auf: Der Stockholmer August Strindberg hat das lokale Bestattungsunternehmen gekauft – samt Leichenwagen – und möchte dort einen Secondhandladen eröffnen.

When a boy leaps to his death from a bridge in the northern town of Umeå, Sweden, police discover drugs scattered in the snow near his body. The town has seen a dramatic increase in narcotic use among its youth, but nobody knows where the pills are coming from.

With the summer season on Sandhamn comes an unsettling mystery for Detective Inspector Thomas Andreasson. A bullied young boy has vanished from a sailing camp on neighboring Lökholmen Island. Has the terrorized eleven-year-old run away? Or, in this isolated vacation spot where strangers lurk, is it something more ominous?

The new summer house on Sandhamn Island is an architectural dream for its owner, Carsten Jonsson. It’s a nightmare for the locals. The venture capitalist has flouted local traditions, property lines, and the natural beauty of the coastline. He’s also too wealthy and arrogant to heed the anonymous warnings to leave. The threats escalate when his guest lodge is burned to the ground and an unidentifiable corpse is found in the charred ruins.