Archive for category: News

The success continues for Steve Sem-Sandberg‘s powerfully gripping novel, The Chosen Ones. After receiving fantastic reviews from British critics the book is now getting fantastic prepub buzz in the US.

Booklist says:
One distressed young face among many others, Adrian Ziegler joins the throng of children admitted to the impressive Am Spiegelgrund clinic in newly Nazified Vienna, a throng needing treatment for serious psychological and physical illnesses. But it is ominously irregular treatment that these young patients receive. In this intensively researched historical novel, readers follow Sem-Sandberg (and his adept translator) into a nightmarish Nazi inversion of medicine subjecting innocent children such as Adrian to inhuman experiments and—in hundreds of cases—to eugenically rationalized euthanasia. An open window allows Adrian to escape and survive, but readers see the horrid abuse and systematic liquidation of other Spiegelgrund patients judged a burden to the Master Race. But not all Spielgelgrund professionals act as Nazi ideologues. Complementing the narrative he develops from Adrian’s perspective, Sem-Sandberg unfolds a tangled second narrative from the viewpoint of Anna Katschenka, a devoted nurse shocked by the discovery that Spiegelgrund employees must execute designated patients. After Allied victory eventually shuts down Am Spiegelgrund, surviving former patients (such as Adrian) struggle with their emotional burdens, and former staff members (such as Anna) confront their guilt. And an entire nation fights the amnesia that would swallow the innocent dead. A harrowing chronicle.
(starred)

Publishers Weekly added: 
In Sem-Sandberg’s previous novel, The Emperor of Lies, the Swedish writer took as his subject the Łódz ́ ghetto in Poland during WWII. In his latest, he revisits the savagery of that war by focusing on Am Spiegelgrund, a real-life Viennese clinic where children “diagnosed with mental illness, mental retardation, or severe malformations” were the victims of Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs. Epic in scope, the novel follows Adrian Ziegler a “patient” of the institution, as he lives there off and on from January 1941 to May 1944, and Anna Katschenka, a nurse who works in the clinic from 1941 until the Russians reach the city at the nurse who works in the clinic from 1941 until the Russians reach the city at the war’s end. Adrian, thought to be of inferior racial stock, with a “Gypsy-type” skull and ears that exhibit a “Semitic curvature,” undergoes the brutal torment and abuse the staff inflict on their charges. He suffers endless cruelty and sexual abuse and bears witness to the murders committed within the clinic’s walls. Anna is a loyal disciple of Dr. Jekelius, the medical director, who unquestioningly becomes party to the Nazis’ state-sanctioned policy of euthanasia, which is, as the doctor tells her, “acts of mercy in the spirit that has always guided medical science, that is to ameliorate or remove sources of pain and suffering.” The novel’s horror is not merely that the crimes it relates are true but the way the most unspeakable atrocities can be committed by the state under the guise of science. With a gift for finding humanity in even the darkest of stories, Sem-Sanberg has written an indelible, moving novel.
(starred)

And Kirkus talks about:
A horror novel, of a sort, in which Swedish novelist Sem-Sandberg (The Emperor of Lies, 2011) returns to the Holocaust to limn its essential inhumanity. Under orders from the newly imposed Nazi regime, doctors at an Austrian clinic are euthanizing the sick children under their care, using lethal injections to dispose of the innocent victims, but not without a few experiments in “encephelography” and “hereditary biology” along the way. Leading the charge is a sadistic doctor, Jekelius, whose only redeeming feature is that his successor is worse. With the doctor’s name, it may be that Sem-Sandberg means for us to think of Dr. Jekyll, but there is not much in the way of a countervailing good force to balance the monsters that stroll the halls of Am Spiegelgrund unhidden. At the center of the story is a young patient, Adrian Ziegler, who watches as, one by one, children disappear from their beds and whose faces he cannot recall: “When Ziegler is shown photographs of the boys, he recognizes most of them but can’t for the life of him work out where or when he has met them.” Occupying much of the story, though, is a figure for whom our empathy builds, only to be shattered, a nurse named Anna Katschenka, who is “efficient, unswervingly loyal and invariably sensible.” She bustles about the ward doing her job, the proverbial good Nazi who was only following orders. Anna at least has a sense of the moral disorder that surrounds her work, and though, years later, on trial for war crimes, she pleads that she is a “decent human being,” we understand that that is true only in a relative sense. There is much evil in the book, and much of it is banal indeed. Making every word count, Sem-Sandberg explores the psychologies of captive and captor, the complexities of bearing witness to things that most people would sooner forget. A memorable meditation on the human capacity to do ill—and to endure.

Another fantastic review for Steve Sem-Sandberg‘s The Chosen Ones. Last Saturday, The UK Times’ Fiona Wilson talked warmly about the book, saying that:

The Chosen Ones is meticulously researched and laden with history but such is Sem-Sandberg’s skill that it does not feel this way: he jumps between his characters and weaves the historical details into their conversations, thoughts and actions. It’s an education but do not approach this book lightly. This is historical fiction at its most raw and disturbing.”

Congratulations to the author for another well-deserved praise.

We are thrilled to announce that two of our Swedish bestsellers Viveca Sten and Simona Ahrnstedt are currently on German Börsenblatt’s bestseller chart. Although they write in very different genres these two talented women have captured the readers’ hearts with their amazing characters and chilling dramas.

Girls Lost, the film based on Jessica Schiefauer‘s amazing novel The Boys, is a huge festival and awards success. The movie had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, with other festivals including Rome FF, Chicago FF, Gothenburg FF, Rotterdam FF, Budapest FF, Antalya FF, Newfest/New York and more. The film was also recently nominated for the European Film Academy Young Audience Award.

see the trailer here: http://tiff.net/festivals/festival15/contemporaryworldcinema/girls-lost

A stunning political suspense debut by Camilla Sten!

Last night saw the much-anticipated release of Camilla Sten’s debut novel A New Dawn, a dystopian novel of a world not far from our own. Though young, Camilla has always been writing and it was no surprise to the people closest to her when she finally presented the world with a manuscript to her first novel. The book was promptly acquired by Ordfront förlag in Sweden for its suspenseful and stylish retelling of a Stockholm where people are judged not on their character but on their origin.

A New Dawn stars Isa who knows how to behave. She knows that you keep your head down and your mouth shut. And you NEVER draw attention to yourself. It might have been otherwise, once, but that doesn’t matter anymore. Isa is class B, and she is well aware of the rules.

At night, though, things are different. At night Isa and her friends wage a covert revolution. By hacking party blogs and spreading fliers with illegal anti-government propaganda they try to make their voices heard. Things suddenly come to an unexpected head when an anonymous blogger claims to have information that could overthrow the government. With the police hot on their heals Isa and her friends will have to decide, once and for all, how much they are willing to sacrifice for freedom.

Although Camilla likes to say that her novel accidentally ended up being about politics that is not quite true. A self-proclaimed feminist from a very young age politics and debate has always come easily to our author who also writes insightful articles on the current political climate for several different newspapers including Expressen and Aftonbladet.

We expect to see many great things from this talented writer.