Category: Scandinavia - Wabonga Press

My Polar Dream

23/11/2018

Jade Hameister: Macmillan Australia, $29.99

JADE Hameister has always been an exceptional achiever.
Aged six she walked to the summit of Mt Kosciuszko.
At 12 she convinced her parents to take her on a family hike through the Himalayas to Everest Base Camp.
The following year, at 13 Hameister set her sights on reaching the South Pole.
Only one obstacle stood in her way: the Hameisters’ chosen guide insisted she be at least 16 years old before attempting such a gruelling expedition.
Undaunted, she decided to kill time with a couple of relatively straightforward warm-up treks: to the North Pole and across the Greenland icecap.
Never having skied, she prepared with a few days’ training in New Zealand’s South Island, then set out from the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway determined to become the youngest person ever to ski entirely unsupported and unassisted from outside the final degree of latitude to the most northerly point in the world.
Along the way her youthful ambition, inspiring teenage message and passionate environmental focus caught the attention of both the National Geographic Society (which engaged a videographer to accompany Hameister and her father on each of their three increasingly taxing challenges) and the team behind the global phenomenon of TEDx talks.
Those same characteristics quickly drew the ire of a cohort of anonymous online trolls, however, who used the phrase “Make me a sandwich” to suggest Hameister’s true purpose as a woman should be to wait on men.
Her reply – along with the nearly three years’ worth of agony, frustration, ecstasy and relief that preceded it as she completed her sub-zero hat-trick – is recounted in Hameister’s own voice, from the joy of opening special letters written by her closest school friends to the physical torture of hauling twice her own bodyweight in a sled over jagged ridges of ice.

The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

12/1/2018

Lars Mytting: Hachette $32.99

IF THERE'S one dominant theme running through Edvard Hirifjell’s life it’s undoubtedly ‘blanks’: the gaping memory blanks that have always pockmarked his early-childhood recollections and now, unexpectedly, the solid timber blanks from which the highest-quality shotgun stocks are carved.
For 20-something years Edvard has known only a quiet, semi-reclusive existence on a potato farm in an agricultural hamlet near Lillehammer in southern Norway. When not tending the crop with his bestefar (grandfather) Sverre he fills his meagre free time with photography and fishing. He has few friends but is not particularly lonely.
Theirs is a typical rural lifestyle in all but one respect: Edvard is an orphan, having lost his parents in an unsolved incident almost 2000km removed from their property at Saksum when he was just a toddler.
When his home circumstances change suddenly Edvard begins a journey of yearning that stretches first to the wind-lashed Shetland Islands and then to the battlefields of northern France.
In treeless Shetland he unearths a clue that tantalises with its potential to explain the mystery of his father and mother’s deaths and at the same time raises the possibility of a family inheritance intertwined with a fabled stand of 16 centuries-old walnut trees warped by World War I combat into a near-priceless resource.
The young man who leaves behind the paddocks and sheds of Saksum to search for crucial pointers in Shetland soon finds himself heading south due, with the remnant woods of Authuille in the Somme as his ultimate destination.
Weaving together the carefully researched details of actual events and locations with an engaging imagined plot, this novel is rich with the history of two world wars and the intimacies of Nordic culture both in Norway itself and across the scattered former Viking settlements of modern-day Scotland’s most remote island group.

Whiteout

21/12/2017

Ragnar Jónasson: Orenda Books $19.99

ICELAND publishes more books per capita than any other country on Earth.
In December the population of 330,000 Icelandic-speakers observes a tradition known as the ‘Christmas book flood’: a full year’s worth of new titles is launched in a roughly week-long deluge, just in time to be wrapped (accompanied by a block of the finest-quality chocolate each) and gifted on Christmas Eve. Icelanders typically then spend the rest of that night snuggled up reading and snacking.
It’s little wonder Iceland’s literature is among some of the sharpest, most beautifully crafted anywhere in the world, influenced by an awe-inspiring, hauntingly bleak landscape, a small-town national psyche and a pervasive, disorienting mid-winter gloom.
Set in the immediate lead-up to Christmas, Whiteout is complete with its own reference to the customary Yuletide exchange of printed matter.
The fifth title in Jónasson’s Dark Iceland series, it continues the story of regional detective Ari Thór Arason and his police-force superior Tómas , now based in the capital, Reykjavík.
Ari Thór’s plans to spend the holiday season at home in Siglufjörður are disrupted by the discovery of a young woman’s body at the base of a cliff at Kálfshamarsvík on Iceland’s remote northwest coastline.
It seems she has jumped – or has she?
In fact, Ásta’s is the third apparent suicide to have occurred in almost-identically inexplicable circumstances – first her mother’s, then her younger sister’s in the girls’ childhood more than 20 years earlier, and now her own during an uncharacteristic, impulsive visit to the lighthouse her father once managed.
Suspicion sweeps across the elderly caretakers of the estate, housekeeper Thóra and her brother Óskar, and its businessman-owner Reynir and his neighbour and part-time farm worker Arnór.
Given the setting’s extreme isolation, this latest death must have involved at least one of these four people – but which one, and why?

Fatal Crossing

15/12/2017

Lone Theils: Echo $29.99

STILL deeply shell-shocked in the wake of interviewing a genocidal Rwandan teacher, journalist Nora Sand decides to distract herself from reality with a couple of minutes of retail therapy. In the sleepy surroundings of a small seaside village it’s impossible to know the ramifications her impulsive decision to buy a battered old leather suitcase will have.
As Danish news magazine Globalt’s UK correspondent, Sand is on assignment with a photographer-friend on the south coast of England when she makes her purchase.
Much later, back home in her inner-city apartment in London, she discovers a bundle of Polaroid photographs secreted behind its frayed lining.
One in particular catches her attention. Its subjects are two teenagers standing in front of a sign that reads ‘Car Deck 2’ – but the language isn’t English; it’s Danish.
When Sand recognises the taller girl as one of two orphans who vanished in the mid 1980s from a cross-channel ferry from Denmark while on an outing with their carers, her professional curiosity and investigative instincts are piqued.
Attempting to piece together the background to Lisbeth and Lulu’s still-unsolved disappearance leads Sand into the law-enforcement world of her highschool classmate Andreas Jansson, a fellow Dane now based temporarily in London while studying anti-terrorism with the British police at New Scotland Yard. Complicating the situation, Sand and Jansson have never resolved an awkward conversation that scarred their once-rock-solid bond years earlier.
When the name of infamous UK serial killer William ‘Bill Hix’ Hickley surfaces in Sand’s research, the importance of retracing the Danish girls’ last known movements takes on renewed urgency.
Could this maniac – a man who kept the tongues of his female victims as trophies – have somehow crossed paths with Lisbeth and Lulu during their travels abroad, or might they instead have fallen victim to an unknown accomplice of Hickley’s, or perhaps a copycat?

The Ice Star / In the Shadow of the Mountain

1/12/2017

Christoffer Petersen: Aarluuk Press (Kindle e-books) $1.30 / $3.99

COMPLETING a pair of novels in a single calendar year is a rare achievement for any writer; having a third title in the series launched within the same 12-month period is an almost-unheard-of feat.
Yet this is precisely what Danish author Christoffer Petersen will achieve when the final instalment in his Konstabel Fenna Brongaard trilogy is published in its English translation on Christmas Eve.
Petersen’s first Greenlandic thriller, The Ice Star, opens with the torture of young Danish military special forces operative Brongaard by two foreign mercenaries in a hut in an isolated settlement far above the Arctic Circle in northeastern Greenland.
Brongaard has been on assignment with the government’s sled-dog patrol, an elite unit established to defend the sovereignty of Denmark’s biggest and most remote territory. Now, she is in the hands of a pair of unrelenting inquisitors who have executed her partner and seem determined to frame her for the sickening murder.
Brongaard’s sole chance of escaping rests with David Maratse, a local policeman in the village in which she is being held.
Set against the severity of Greenland’s harsh, icebound, arid terrain, Brongaard’s desperate scramble for survival leads from tiny Scoresbysund across thickly packed sea-ice onto a luxurious coastal expedition ship, where the passengers turn out to be every bit as formidable as the pursuers she has so far evaded on land, and to the high-rise offices of cut-throat corporate Canada.
The suspense continues in In the Shadow of the Mountain, in which the life-or-death action is set in three immensely contrasting locations: cosmopolitan Copenhagen, the Arizona desert in the US and an exploratory mine site outside Greenland’s capital, Nuuk.
The third episode in this Bourne-like Nordic adventure, the soon-to-be-released The Shaman’s House, will feature an Australian connection, linking the world’s two major islands on diametrically opposite sides of the globe.

Lycke

6/10/2017

Mikaela Bley: Scribe $32.99

WHEN eight-year-old Lycke Höök vanishes from a neighbourhood tennis complex in Stockholm, Sweden, it’s not only members of the little girl’s immediate family who are traumatised.
For TV news crime reporter Ellen Tamm, Lycke’s unexplained disappearance unleashes still-ragged recollections of a terrifyingly similar upheaval in her own childhood two decades earlier.
Delivered to her regular Friday afternoon coaching session by her father’s new wife, Chloé, unaware that the lesson has been cancelled, Lycke is left standing alone outside the courts.
It’s a cold, wet late-May evening.
By the time mother Helena arrives two hours later to collect her daughter, Lycke is gone.
Initially, Stockholm’s police are reluctant to accept the situation as anything more than a disgruntled child having run away from an unhappy existence juggled between two combative households. Time that could be spent searching is frittered away, with few officers assigned to the case and even fewer approaching it seriously.
Reliving the agony of her parallel experience, Ellen steps in, channelling her professional research skills and intuition into the most important investigative story of her high-profile career.
Suspicion ricochets back and forth between Lycke’s estranged parents, emotionally distant stepmother and cocky tennis coach, Petter, a young man whose sexually threatening behaviour unnerves Ellen when he agrees to be interviewed.
As Ellen scrambles in desperation to analyse the dysfunctional Höök dynamic, searching for the slightest clue to Lycke’s whereabouts, her probing reveals a lonely, socially awkward introvert taunted by her schoolmates, neglected by Helena and Harald and resented by Chloé.
Her one friend and confidant is her nanny, Mona, a woman whose entire working life has been devoted to raising other people’s children but who is now within days of retiring from service. With time running out, will Mona’s final week as Lycke’s caregiver end in happiness or grief?

The Woman in Cabin 10

22/9/2017

Ruth Ware: Vintage $19.99

IT HAS the makings of an extraordinary, all-expenses-paid, first-class indulgence: a five-day northern lights cruise to the Arctic tip of Norway aboard a lavishly appointed vessel so exclusive it carries no more than a dozen handpicked passengers.
Not surprisingly, British travel writer Lauren ‘Lo’ Blacklock is acutely conscious of her privileged status alongside fellow journalists, photographers and potential investors invited to join the maiden voyage.
At the same time, her enthusiasm is overshadowed by the echoes of a violent burglary at her flat in London only days before her scheduled departure that has left Lo with bruises on her face and a case of crippling insomnia. Her preparation is dampened even further by an ill-timed argument with her boyfriend and the temptation to self-medicate with alcohol.
It’s an unfortunate lead-up to what Lo has been hoping will become her big career break: the chance to finally show off her professional capabilities.
Surely such luxurious surrounds will be the healing balm that’s needed to help Lo conquer her nightmares and refocus – or so she thinks.
Within hours of boarding the tiny ship, however, Lo finds herself fearing for her safety all over again.
Jolted out of her boozy, sleepless, post-midnight daze by a human scream, she staggers to the railing of her cabin balcony to glimpse a female body slipping beneath the surface of the near-freezing ocean.
When her attempt to alert the ship’s security chief is brushed off, Lo begins to suspect that something truly sinister is occurring.
Is there a murderer lurking somewhere on board – one of the VIPs with whom she has already shared a dinner table, perhaps, or a member of the beautifully mannered but timid crew? Or did the mysterious ‘dead’ woman never exist at all, as an increasing number of people around Lo now insist?

The Killing Bay

1/9/2017

Chris Ould: Titan Books £7.99

IT’S not every day that a novel set in one of the world’s least-known archipelagos, the Faroe Islands, appears in print. Even rarer is a book that delivers both a spine-tingling plot and at the same time an insightful, informative and entertaining glimpse into the psyche of the Faroese population.
Faroes-born, British-raised policeman Jan Reyna is back in the islands for the funeral of his biological father, a man with whom Reyna has had no contact since his mother died, leaving her five-year-old son to be raised by her sister in England.
At the same time the Faroese are celebrating the start of the traditional whaling season – a time when pods are driven onto beaches to be butchered and then shared by the community. This centuries-old but gory act of self-sufficiency has caught the attention of an international animal rights group that is determined to disrupt the practice in any way it can.
When the anti-whaling protesters’ photographer, Erla Sivertsen, is found murdered, the culprit is soon identified as a local fishing-boat captain and the victim’s former boyfriend, now a married man who rekindled his relationship with Sivertsen when she returned to document the hunt and for the past few weeks has been involved with her in a clandestine affair.
It’s an open-and-shut case, according to the local law enforcement branch’s second-in-command, based in Tórshavn, the Faroes’ capital and only town of any real size.
Police detective Hjalti Hentze isn’t quite so certain, however, despite being the adulterous fisherman’s father-in-law, and enlists Reyna’s help to explore other possibilities. Inadvertently the pair opens a door on subterfuge, espionage and covert intelligence that stretches far beyond the Faroes’ own watery border.
Ould describes the landscape, culture and lifestyle of the Faroe Islands to perfection, delivering a portrait of an impressively independent society that takes care of itself when threatened.

The Ice Lands

7/4/2017

Steinar Bragi: Macmillan $29.99

IT HAS all the makings of a leisurely couple of weeks of sightseeing by day and sipping wine around a campfire at dusk – either that or a tension-filled nightmare in which four 30-somethings snap and snarl at each other as the ceaseless forced proximity sets tempers alight.
When two couples – Hrafn and Vigdís, and Egill and Anna – set out from Reykjavík for a driving adventure through the Icelandic highlands, each is looking forward to spending time with his or her partner and friends but is also already nursing their own highly personal and unsettling concerns.
The GFC has left their country crippled, due in no small part to the short-sighted, self-serving actions of lawyers like Egill and futures-trading businessmen like Hrafn – two greedily ambitious young men with a love of living an adrenaline- and drug-fuelled life on the edge.
Although outwardly more settled, their girlfriends – psychologist Vigdís and journalist Anna – are also deeply troubled, not least of all by doubts about their current relationships.
Week one of the journey has passed relatively smoothly, but as the foursome presses on late one night, hungry, exhausted and desperately seeking shelter from a ferocious volcanic sandstorm, their luck expires. Suddenly, with visibility close to zero, their vehicle strikes something immense.
Stranded in an unmapped, supposedly uninhabited wasteland, the group begins to experience a series of increasingly bizarre scenarios.
How can a farming couple in the middle of nowhere eke out an existence without livestock? Why are two supposedly wild Arctic foxes lurking alarmingly close to a homestead?
As resentment and distrust escalate, can the four city-dwellers find a way of escaping what has become a truly terrifying rural ordeal?
Author Steinar Bragi seamlessly blends reality and paranoia, actuality and imagination to create a novel that has been described to perfection as Iceland’s Twin Peaks.

Why Did You Lie?

13/1/2017

Yrsa Sigurdardóttir: Hachette Australia $32.99

IT IS deep winter in Iceland: a bleak, gloomy season when the region’s few hours of daylight are marred by unpredictable blizzards, roaring Arctic gales and impenetrable, all-enveloping fog.
Over the course of roughly a week in late January, in the south-west of the country a series of unexplained, grisly events unfolds.
Nói and Vala arrive home with son Tumi from a holiday in Florida to find the Americans with whom they’ve swapped houses have moved on from Reykjavík seemingly in a hurry and without leaving the family’s spare set of door keys behind.
Nína, a policewoman ostracised for daring to complain about a fellow officer, is punished by her superiors by being assigned a dreary, dirty administrative job in the station’s basement. At the same time, she is grieving the inevitable loss of her husband, investigative journalist Thröstur, who is lying brain-dead in hospital. Only a couple of weeks earlier Nína discovered Thröstur hanging from a beam in the couple’s garage.
Introverted photographer Helgi has been invited to accompany a work party winched in by helicopter to a lighthouse on the largest of the famous ‘Three Stacks’, a set of exposed sheer rock pillars jutting out of the Atlantic Ocean. His temporary companions, Heida, Ívar and Tóti, are abrupt and unwelcoming.
When deteriorating weather leaves them marooned on a surface area barely big enough to support a single-room structure, the four strangers become suspicious, distrusting, even paranoid. As they remain forced together with literally nowhere to go, dangerous tensions arise.
In the midst of it all are bodies: bodies floating, bodies dangling, bodies unaccounted for.
Adding to the confusion are cryptic messages, printed or scrawled, alleging some form of dishonesty.
Do these three apparently unrelated storylines somehow intersect? What could possibly link them – other than the shame of a long-shared lie?

The Ice Beneath Her

9/12/2016

Camilla Grebe: Allen & Unwin $39.99

STOCKHOLM'S crisp mid-winter perfection has been shattered, its pristine snowscape disfigured by a geyser of human blood. In an exclusive outer suburb of the city a woman has been murdered, her body crumpled in a hallway, the head propped upright and staring vacantly towards the millionaire homeowner’s front door.
The building’s only known occupant, Jesper Orre, is missing. The playboy CEO of Scandinavia’s fastest-growing clothing chain, Orre has vanished, presumed to have fled the scene of his crime.
Peter is one of the first police officers deployed to attend, a detective desensitised by constant exposure to the gruesome realities of homicide. His focus is all-consuming – a convenient distraction from the bitterness of a failed marriage and a lack of interest in his teenaged son.
In actual fact it’s Orre’s second disappearance in as many months, although only one person knows of his previous desertion. Wearing an impressive diamond ring on one finger, Emma has been waiting for Orre to share a glass or two of wine with her while toasting their yet-to-be-publicised engagement. He’s never missed so much as a phonecall, let alone his own celebratory dinner; his fiancée is distraught.
At the age of 59, behavioural scientist Hanne is also harbouring a personal secret: the humiliating signs of early-onset dementia. Recruited to assist investigators again after a 10-year hiatus, she uses her newly resurrected career as rebellion against a psychologically undermining husband.
A decade earlier, Hanne – at that stage drafted in as a police consultant for the first time – and Peter worked on another case together: a case with eerie similarities to the current one at Orre’s house. Then, professional collaboration morphed into a disastrous affair that sapped her self-confidence.
Narrated in rotation by Peter, Emma and Hanne, this thriller pivots on chilling parallel existences, unnerving delusions, festering resentment and lifelong regrets.

Britt-Marie Was Here

2/12/2016

Fredrik Backman: Sceptre $29.99

BRITT-MARIE is not the type of woman to put a coffee cup down without using a coaster, not does she eat pizza straight from its box.
Britt-Marie is proper, attentive, precise, correct – “normal”, in other words.
To less particular people, however, Britt-Marie could be described as obsessive-compulsive: a career homemaker who has used the same cleaning product for decades and who must disinfect a hotel-room mattress with bicarbonate of soda before being able to fall asleep.
Suddenly, at the age of 63, Britt-Marie finds herself looking for a job – not because she needs the income, mind you, but because she fears lying dead for weeks before being found because nobody is expecting her.
Britt-Marie has worked her entire adult life; she has helped her husband, Kent, with his business as an entrepreneur. Her role has been important: keeping their home “presentable”. Now, though, the marriage is over courtesy of a long-running affair that Britt-Marie discovered when Kent’s much younger mistress telephoned her after he suffered a heart attack.
At first her chances of finding employment seem bleak but then she is offered a poorly paying position as the caretaker of the recreation centre in Borg, a withering hamlet in which almost everything else has already closed down.
Borg’s singular passion is soccer; residents of all ages are fixated on the game. It’s the only thing standing between the township’s children and a future of delinquency and hopelessness.
Britt-Marie detests soccer, yet little by little she is drawn into the youngsters’ social circle and eventually finds herself nominated as their team’s official coach.
Will this be a bright new beginning for Britt-Marie – a chance to reinvent herself away from critical, emotionally controlling Kent?
Quirky and tender, entertaining and humorous, this novel delivers a thought-provoking yet light-hearted insight into an alternative way of viewing life.

Blackout

18/11/2016

Ragnar Jónasson: Orenda Books £8.99

ICELAND is reeling. Still struggling in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, the country has been struck by a second, equally unexpected blow: the 2010 volcanic eruption and subsequent rumblings of Eyjafjallajökull. An ash cloud is enveloping Reykjavík, polluting the city’s air.
And now a third headline-worthy event has occurred: the gruesome discovery of a body on a building site in the Skagafjörður region fronting the Norwegian Sea. A construction contractor has been beaten to death.
Responsibility for investigating falls to the local police team headed up by two men linked by the shared sadness of relationship breakdowns – Tómas and his protégé, one-time theology student Ari Thór – and their colleague Hlynur, an officer with a haunting secret of his own. Ari Thór’s former girlfriend, Kristín, is now a doctor in Akureyri; Tómas’s wife has moved even further afield, to Reykjavík, and shows no desire to return to the village isolation of remote Siglufjörður.
The capital is home, too, to Ísrún, a psychologist turned TV reporter who immediately bluffs the newsroom chief into allowing her to cover the sensational murder case.
Ari Thór’s questioning leads to an interview with Nóra, a divorcee who travelled the world for much of her adult life before being grounded by the loss of her savings in the economic implosion. Nóra was the murder victim’s landlady, apparently unaware that in a sports bag in his bedroom he kept the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash – cash for which his three tunnel-drilling associates cannot account.
Blackout is the intriguing third book in Jónasson’s Dark Iceland crime series of Nordic noir featuring detective Ari Thór and set in and around real-life Siglufjörður, a one-time herring-fishing port and Iceland’s northernmost town. The two previous offerings, Snowblind and Nightblind, were both Amazon Kindle bestsellers in Australia.

March 04th, 2016

4/3/2016

Ulla-Lena Lundberg: Allen & Unwin $22.99

LIFE is at once bizarrely complicated and unnervingly simple in the Örlands, a Swedish-speaking cluster on the outskirts of the Åland islands. Scattered midway between Stockholm and the Finnish mainland, the archipelago is almost exclusively conservative Lutheran, made up of families who have lived for generations in the same few fishing settlements.
World War II is still subsiding across northern Europe when newly graduated pastor Petter Kummel and his wife Mona arrive in the Örlands with their baby daughter Sanna. It is the Kummels’ first posting, and together they must forge their young marriage virtually alone, cut off from their neighbours by water and, in deepest midwinter, almost-constant darkness and expansive sea-ice.
Mona – confident, competent, pragmatic and grounded – is the ideal complement for naïve, impractical, other-worldly Petter, she as blunt and workmanlike as he is trusting and whimsical. When the parsonage’s cows must be milked or its paddocks cut for hay it is Mona who takes charge while her husband counsels parishioners and studies for his theological exam. United, though, they face the everyday minutiae of an isolated existence a full day’s sailing by mail-ship from the nearest real town.
The winner of Finland’s most prestigious literary award in 2012 and just released in English for the first time, Ice is the product of Åland author Ulla-Lena Lundberg, whose experiences living in the islands enrich this novel with an astonishing depth of authentic grassroots detail. In keeping with local tradition, Lundberg applies Swedish-language names to Finland’s two major cities, Helsinki (Helsingfors) and Turku (Åbo), with cultural descriptions that give a genuine insight into the bipolar culture of this tiny outpost.
The distinctively Scandinavian sensibilities that shape the storyline – at times heart-warming and in the next instant tragic – keep this intimate small-town tale unpredictable and engrossing right to the final page.

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