Akoya Publishing – förlag

‘Where there is money, there will be sex.’Anthropologist Sine Plambech has dedicated her life to pursuing the trail of sex and money across continents.In Global Sex, she draws back the curtain on a hidden world, sharing intimate conversations with sex workers from Nigeria and Thailand living in Europe. And when she retraces the treacherous routes that led them from their families, she finds lives transformed by the money that absent mothers, daughters, wives and sisters send home.Plambech is unsparing in her analysis of the international sex trade, yet compassionate in her treatment of the women who work in it. It is these women who take centre stage, reminding us that behind every statistic, there is a human story.

DO YOU GLOW IN THE DARK?In Liliana Colanzi’s singular collection of short stories, set in a Latin America at once real and otherworldly, human vice contaminates every page. Amid eerie near-future landscapes, in communities both ordinary and uncanny, and during the very real fallout of a nuclear disaster, Colanzi’s characters must contend with a poisoned legacy.Unpredictable and vivid, You Glow in the Dark radiates in the reader’s mind long after the final page and announces a daring new voice in fiction.

Hafni says: I don’t want to be me.I want to change who I am.I don’t know how to change who I am. Hafni says she’s getting divorced. To celebrate, she sets out across Denmark on a smørrebrød tour, to taste-test all of the best open-faced sandwiches her country has to offer. One month later, she makes a phone call from a lay-by to tell us where she went, what went wrong and why she’s been gone for three weeks longer than expected.Marked by Helle Helle’s signature subtlety and infused with her dark humour, Hafni says explores the desire to be anyone but yourself – and what it means to rediscover who you are.'Colourful, intricate and surprising, a whole rich world in microcosm.' Polly Barton, author of What Am I, A Deer?

‘Who is Gelsomina to remark on love? Much of life has never happened for her.’Gelsomina lives inside a house made of glass. Its cold, clear form separates her from the world beyond, and her architect owners dictate the monotonous structure of her days. She yearns for something, but she does not know what.Two creatures live inside Gelsomina, her warm flesh a vessel that contains them. They grow stronger while she begins to fade.As time passes, the lovable French bulldog and the parasites she hosts confront questions that have vexed philosophers for centuries: Who designed this life that I am living? Do they have a plan for me? Do I have free will to live my life as I please?A bold and inventive debut examining the structures that both comfort and constrain us, The Oldest Bitch Alive offers a poignant meditation on our search for meaning.

They go for a walk by the playing fields, the anemones are out. In the small Danish town of Rødby, a mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter live uneventfully, each day marked by routine and a quiet intimacy. Together, they are a family; complete, content – and fragile.When the mother begins to feel unwell, everything and nothing changes. They go about their lives, talk about anything but the diagnosis. The daughter takes tentative steps into adulthood. Still, illness – and the possibility of loss – cast an expansive shadow over the rituals of daily life.they is a tender and piercing exploration of a mother–daughter relationship, brought into startling focus by Helle Helle’s distinctive, immediate prose.

I sail out of the fjord, out towards the ocean, where there is air and I can breathe and I breathe. I breathe. It has been four years since Veronica Skotnes left her life on the mainland to live in isolation on a sailboat and experience the unforgiving wrath of the wind and the waves. Now, she heads towards Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway, to visit islands where strangers share her longing for the sea. As she sets sail, she prepares to face the dangers of an open ocean and empty ports, in exchange for the relief of nature and community.North of the Winter Sun is an evocative portrayal of the hospitality found in isolated fishing villages, global warming’s impact on the ocean and its wildlife, and a young woman’s search for agency and freedom aboard an old, beloved boat.

Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2026'To write a will under siege is not surrender – it’s defiance. It says: I existed. I felt. I belonged. I am not yours to erase.' – Reem GhanayemIn Book of Wills, eighteen Gazan writers share their last will and testament.A profound exploration of the written word as an act of resistance, the collection includes pieces by several writers who have since been killed, including the poem ‘If I Must Die’ by Rifaat Al-Ara’ir.Book of Wills is a devastating account of the human cost of war, and bears witness to the lives and memories of the Gazan people.

I’M FRIGHTENED OF MY DREAMS, OF EVERYTHING I DON’T KNOW, BUT ALSO OF EVERYTHING I KNOW. Marisol’s country is collapsing. A military coup sends the five-year-old and her family fleeing into the night. They seek shelter in a refugee camp where her parents try to protect her from danger while they await asylum.Marisol spends her adult life trying to cope with the memories from her childhood, the aunts and uncles she left behind, the friends whose names she no longer recalls. But when her boyfriend wants to learn more about her past, she finds herself confronting the trauma that haunts her.Chiquitita is a tender novel about flight and exile, the passing of time, and the experiences that remain with us, refusing erasure.

'We got used to the silence around us and to the stories we didn’t understand.' Stine was just four years old when the country she was born into ceased to exist. Too young to remember life before the fall of the Berlin Wall, she grew up in a household haunted by loss and fracture. Her family struggled to find its place in a newly unified Germany, and questions about the past were met with silence – a silence that transformed their home into a place of fear. Told in fragments that blend fiction, poetry and a searing investigation of the past, The Possibility of Happiness finds Stine, now an author, reckoning with her family’s – and her country’s – complex history.

‘I’m going to tell you what happened to me and what didn’t happen to me. The possibility that nothing happened to me is what's giving me the shakes.’Marta believes she is dying. With the onset of menopause, the changes to her body are stirring up new anxieties. Every time she feels a pain in her chest, a numbness in her arm, or a tension in her clavicle, she assumes she has cancer, or some other diagnosis she has yet to learn of.During a flight, she starts to experience a pain underneath her rib. Unsure whether the pain signals the ominous approach of death or a simple bout of flatulence, Marta descends into an examination of pain’s impact upon her life. Is her body failing her or is she failing her body?From one of Spain’s most widely read and acclaimed authors, My Clavicle And Other Massive Misalignments is a provocative and vulnerable semi-autobiographical novel rendering a memorable portrait of pain, health anxiety and menopause.

'For a book to be a book it can't speak only to you. It has to be for everyone.’She has never told anyone about her previous pregnancies or abortions. Not even her doctors. But after four years struggling to conceive end in the loss of three babies at once, Antonella Lattanzi finally decides to share her story.Visceral, rageful, artful and true, Things That Go Unspoken is a novel that will resonate with anyone who has ever asked: Why is it easy for everyone else to get pregnant but me? Will I have to abandon my dreams to have a child? Do I even want to be a mother?

‘My mother lingered on the threshold between my life and my death, inhabiting it with the levity and nonchalance that had always marked her treatment of me.’A young woman and her mother spend a day at the beach. Soon the woman is in labour, three months early. At the hospital she slips from the glare of the lights toward the deep shadows of her own childhood, while doctors and nurses fight to keep her and her baby alive.Moving with dreamlike intensity between a heart-breaking past and a heart-stopping present, this fearless novel asks: in longing for a child do we also long to break free of a mother? And what was it that happened exactly, that day at the beach?

The landscape of the Navajo Nation is in the grip of dramatic transformation. Sand dune migration has led to drought and 191 horses have been found drowned in a stock pond filled with mud.Opening with a meditation on this loss, Horses is an electric response to crisis: a reclamation of land, imagination and language; a fierce act of protest; and a song for the beauty of nature. It evokes both the end of a world and a sense of emergence amid chaos, a new dawn flickering on the horizon.Somewhere in a dune fieldI am hunched over like a commastudying the way a landfillcan be mistaken for a sky

Ping leaves Hong Kong for a prosperous life in New Zealand – or so she has been led to believe. Instead she works long hours frying fish in a rat-infested shop, and at home contends with a dissolute husband and four children who struggle with their mother’s unhappiness.Polyphonic and richly textured, Chinese Fish is an intergenerational saga spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. It is an intimate insight into family dynamics, oral and written legacies, migratory histories, and the lives of mothers and daughters.‘For these immigrantsfrom the impoverishedunsanitaryvillages of China,where beggars and vagabonds are numerous,and lepers peculiarly wretched,where the coast is infestedwith pirates, childrenkidnapped and sold, and whole familieslive on boats,New Zealand is a paradise.'

'Now that you've grown and I've fallen ill, our bodies can no longer fit together.'Winner of the Strega Prize 2023Ada d’Adamo is mother to Daria. Their days are absorbed by caregiving and routine. Daria’s profound needs remained undetected in pregnancy, and with her birth, Ada’s world is remade.As a dancer she must use her physicality in new ways, to keep her daughter safe. As a writer she must find a language to communicate beyond words. And when, on the cusp of her fifties, Ada herself becomes gravely ill, she takes the most courageous decision of all: to leave Daria their story.This is Gravity, a journey of isolation, anger and sometimes despair, through moments of joy and exquisite tenderness, towards a love stronger than life.

'Everywhere in the wilderness I hear the cries of other mothers. I call back to them, asking for help, but sometimes they can’t hear me through their own cries’A forty-day journey of trial and transformation has meaning in many cultures, including in Savaş’s own. In this candid, tender essay, she charts a path through an unknown landscape – the first forty days of motherhood – in search of herself and the words for what has happened to her, following the birth of her baby.

‘On the horizon of the frozen sea there is no trace of light.’In the darkness of the polar night, writer and photographer Ilona Wiśniewska travels to two of the most remote settlements in northern Greenland, where distant geopolitics and the very present climate crisis threaten the traditions and culture of the indigenous people. There, she is welcomed into the homes of the Inughuit community and shares their days, their rituals, their conversations, bearing witness to a way of life increasingly at risk. Intertwining arresting photography and storytelling, Glimmer: From the Outskirts of Greenland explores the stark beauty of the polar landscape, and the lives of the people who call it home.

‘What if we could read our own past, our memories, even our bodies, as if they too were books open to endless interpretation?’Haunted by her father’s abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother and the death of her child, Lidia Yuknavitch revisits her past with an author’s gaze. At the age of sixty, her outlook on herself has changed. She wonders differently, remembers differently. She comes to discover that – like any narrative – her memories are open to interpretation, to being reimagined from different perspectives. And as Yuknavitch rewrites and reclaims her early life, she unburdens herself of old wounds and alters her future.

'I am between two homes, an old one and a new.'In Paris, Marie Engmo lies in the dark, quietly nursing her newborn daughter. More than a thousand miles to the north, her grandmother – her áhkku – dies.Marie is untethered by grief, caught between the new life she has built and the unyielding pull of family. On the long journey home, and as she travels further away from her child, she starts to write about her áhkku and her Sámi heritage. But how can words ever capture the richness of áhkku’s life, or explain the generations of violent oppression her people have faced?Fierce, original and deeply personal, The Sámi Problem explores how to be other in a world that has sought to erase you, and the bonds that connect us, even as we move apart.