People who aren’t careful to do so risk being labeled dangerous and taken away. You must name your pencil, a pencil, now and then, and never call it anything else, or it could dissolve into sludge.

In the grim dystopia that Vanja lives in, every item must be “marked” often, or named, to keep it what it is. We open with Vanja, a woman on her way to do market research in the colony of Amatka. So in order to give you this list of grim dystopias and creative speculative fiction, of stark realist literary fiction and emotional contemporary literature, I drew from a variety of genres and authors.

Published in 2005, it had sold 30 million copies worldwide by 2010, and was ranked by The Guardian as one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.īut looking past Stieg Laarson, what Swedish books available in English translation should you read? Please don’t assume that all Swedish literature is cold crime investigation and psychological thrillers - you should know that childhood classic Pippi Longstocking, about the antics of a wild, strong, mischievous red-pigtailed girl, came from Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, translated by Florence Lamborn. Perhaps most famously, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Laarson, translated by Reg Keeland, took the world by storm (although Keeland still isn’t listed on the book’s cover). Scandinavian literature is famous for its crime novels and bleak landscapes.

Amatka book