Startling in its revelations, disturbing in its implications - a thriller of gripping intensity and immense literary power.

Two violent deaths in the Swedish wilderness; the hurried flight of a sinister stranger: terrible events long buried in Annie Raft's memory - until she sees her daughter in the arms of the man she believes responsible for the killings...

In the heart of the tranquil countryside, a young puppy leaves his home to eagerly follow his mother and master. But away from the safe haven of the farm, the puppy soon becomes lost and is left to struggle for survival in the wild. Suddenly, he must find food and a safe place to sleep, and outwit his competitor, the fox. The puppy becomes wild himself, trusting no human and furiously fighting the hunting dogs that enter his domain.
But one man is intrigued by the now-unruly dog and very slowly begins to gain his trust. Each day he visits the dog, bringing food and awakening memories of...

Kerstin Ekman is primarily known as a novelist, but she has occasionally turned to free verse, especially when the subject is autobiographical. In 1993-1994, Swedish TV 1 conducted a series of talks with prominent writers under the rubric 'Seven Boys and Seven Girls'. In place of an ordinary interview, Kerstin Ekman read aloud Barndom (Childhood). The poem, which was published for the first time in Swedish Book Review in 1995, appears here with original photographs kindly provided by the author. The prose passages are quotations from Ekman's 1988 novel Rovarna i Skuleskogen (The Forest of...

Witches' Rings portrays the history of a rural society in a new light, tracing its development through the lives of working class women and children rather than authorities and decision-makers. The central character is a woman so anonymous that her name is not even mentioned on her gravestone. This novel, written in 1974 and now published for the first time in English, is the first volume of a tetralogy which follows a Swedish community through a hundred years of recent history to the present day.

Kerstin Ekman's novel Blackwater took the world by storm in 1993 and has now been translated into over twenty-five languages. But her reputation as one of Sweden's best-known and most successful authors rests just as securely upon the series of four novels she wrote between 1974 and 1983, which are based on the author's childhood home town of Katrineholm some forty miles southwest of Stockholm. The first of these, Witches' Rings, which portrays the final years of the nineteenth century in a small urban community on the cusp of industrialisation, was published by Norvik Press in 1997. The...

The Angel House is the third in the remarkable series of free-standing novels that cemented Kerstin Ekman's reputation in her native Sweden during the 1970s, long before she achieved world-wide success with novels like Blackwater and The Forest of Hours. It follows the fortunes of the inhabitants of a provincial Swedish town familiar from the previous two books in the sequence, Witches' Rings and The Spring, from the late 1920s to the Second World War, when events beyond the boundaries of neutral Sweden threaten to disrupt the regular rhythms of life. With this sequence of novels focussing...

Ann-Marie is a middle-aged woman returning from Portugal to the Swedish town in which she grew up in order to sell the old house she has inherited from her father. Memories of the past are everywhere, ensnaring her. She ends up staying in the house, alone with her memories of her father, an idiosyncratic character whom only she truly understood. She is also nervously awaiting the arrival of her daughter, and now realises that she has never really tried to understand her. With this eloquent and gripping story Kerstin Ekman concludes her epic sequence of novels, Women and the City (whose...