The World of Books

Last Night at the Lobster is an interesting and enjoyable book written in a quiet mood about life and love in the working world. A tale about ordinary life, with ordinary, real people in it.
The story is about Manny De Leon, manager of a Red Lobster restaurant in a dismal section of Connecticut. The franchise [...]

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (The Girl With The Dragoon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and the title of the third volume still to be decided for the English translation) is hot stuff. The sales figures to date are stunning (from Shotsmag):
2.1 million copies sold in Sweden* (the paperback of Volume III is not [...]

Missing grabs the reader from the first page, and doesn’t let go until the gruesome end. This fabulous thriller won Best Scandinavian Crime Novel (previous winners include Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla and Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers) and Silverpocket Awards in 2002. With Missing Karin Alvtegen has enjoyed massive success all over Europe.
Sibylla Forstenström is the [...]

While Before You Sleep was not viewed as controversial in Norway, American reviewers have regarded it as a “detailed and sexually frank novel.” Such labels aside, Before You Sleep is a great and interesting story of a Norwegian family, Blom, with strong and also somewhat eccentric women, that spans several generations. The story moves [...]

The following list is from EuroCrime – a nice blog on European Crime fiction, as well as TV and film:

Rounding the Mark – Andrea Camilleri
The Scent of the Night – Andrea Camilleri
The Serbian Dane – Leif Davidsen
The Princess of Burundi – Kjell Eriksson
Calling Out for You! – Karin Fossum
The Chinaman – Friedrich Glauser
The Exception – [...]

I just recently found Giants in the Earth on the Internet, more or less by accident. It is a great book, wonderful even. Rolvaag (or Rølvåg or Rölvaag, depending) seems to be somewhat known among Norwegian-Americans, hardly known at all to Danish-Americans or Swedish-Americans, and known by only a very, very few in Norway and [...]

The Swedes are invading the marked for crime and mystery in the UK and USA, and elsewhere in Europe as well. Sweden has a large – and even fast growing -number of excellent crime writers, and many of them have been translated into English during the last decade or so. “Swedish crime book” is almost [...]

The Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg, (born Bergen, Norway 1684, died Sorø, Denmark 1754) was a prolific and entertaining writer, famous mostly for his extremely amusing, divine comedies (Jeppe on the Hill and Erasmus Montanus are probably the best known). However, he also wrote a story that may be considered one of the first science fiction [...]

“We are at rest five miles behind the front”. This is how one of the world’s great literary treasures, All Quiet on the Western Front, begins. It is a story about a common soldier’s experience in WWI, written in a quiet style, yet conveying the horrific experiences of war in such a way that it has been [...]

“A person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair,” says Hajime, the main character in this book. And he sees this damage as two-sided, where the person causing the damage is wounded as well: “Maybe I’ve lost the chance to ever be a decent human being,” he goes on to think.
Haruki Murakami [...]