Nordisk Books – förlag

Fixed Ideas is a restless and effective tale of desire, gender and longing, about fundamental loneliness and the constant, gnawing awareness that threatens our ability to encounter one another as the person we really are.

The story of a young woman and a slightly older man, both working at a newspaper in Oslo, who have a one night stand. Fixed Ideas explores how their relationship and perception of each other develops in the aftermath.

So successful in its native Sweden that it has gone on to become both a play and an opera, Ebba Witt-Brattström’s debut novel, Love/War, was originally released in 2016, two years after her much publicised divorce from Swedish Academy chair, Horace Engdahl.

A novel of fragments, it is laid out in the form of a hate-filled discourse between the two protagonists, She and He. Peppered with cultural references and in homage to Strindberg as well as Märta Tikkanen, this powerful work from one of the founding members of the Feminist Initiative is unlike anything in contemporary literature right now.

Stockholm. Early summer, 1989. Johan is a young waiter working at the Hard Rock Café. His nights are filled with parties, drugs, booze and MTV. An endless chase of the next girl, the next high... the next music video.

The first book in a loose trilogy, when Cigarette was first published in Sweden it heralded the arrival of a bold new voice in contemporary nordic literature. A troubadour of 1990s’ metropolitan nightlife, Nordisk Books is delighted to publish Per Hagman’s electric début in English for the first time, thanks to Elinor Fahrman’s crisp translation.

Tom introduces me to a couple of girls that I recognise from Dailys and they turn out to be Tina and Mimi. He asks if I want champagne and hands me a bottle of fizzy wine. I open it and when the cork hits the ceiling with a bang Viktor turns around and says hello and I say hello as I lift the bottle to my mouth. Just as I’m lighting a cigarette a champagne cork lands on my head and I turn around and Micke is laughing out loud and asks how things are and I say fine and he asks me if I have any coke and I say no and he says maybe you want some of mine then. He turns to Tom and smiles and asks if he has a free mirror and Tom laughs and says sure. Jocke enters the room and asks me how things are and I say splendid and watch Tom as he grabs the girl on the table who’s still on the phone. He stands her up and starts looking for a mirror amongst the ashtrays and bottles. I notice that both the TV sets are on but no one is watching. One of them is showing some music video and the other a black and white film. Tom hands Micke the mirror and he chops up some lines and one of the girls (Tina?) rolls up a tenner and Micke hands her the mirror and she snorts a line.

“... a despair so sincere that it becomes comforting.” - Vi Läser

First published in 1999, Orissa is the only collection Ola Julén released in his lifetime and it has since become a cult classic of contemporary Scandinavian poetry. Stark, intimate, and unflinching, Julén’s voice is unlike any other: a raw distillation of despair, tenderness, and emotional candour that shuns literary ornament in favour of unguarded truth. A profound meditation on grief, silence, and the limits of language, Orissa remains shockingly relevant, continuing to resonate with new generations of readers and writers. This long-awaited English edition marks the arrival of a singular and uncompromising voice in world poetry.

Kim Hiorthøy’s book of very short stories manages the almost impossible balancing act of weighing up the comedic against the poignant, tying both together with knots of absurdity. Often no more than a few lines long, this series of 40-odd texts is like a wall riddled with bullet holes, each one offering a snatched glimpse into a contemporary world of mundane, heartbreaking failure, joyous collapse and confounding realisations.

I tell her I’ve stopped taking my pillsI write that I’m still not well, that it’s making day-to-day life difficultThat I often do things I regret, and that there’s some sort of membrane between what I want to do and whatever I end up doingThat I really want to be an actor, but that it’s a dream that seems all too distant for the time beingI tell her I use and abuse alcohol and drugs, and that I’ve got a death wish that sometimes becomes difficult to ignoreThat I don’t know who I amThat I change my mind as frequently as I change my socksThat I’m horrible to the people around meThat my sex life is depravedGine Cornelia Pedersen’s début novel won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award in its native Norway upon publication and went on togarner numerous glowing reviews, with major broadsheet Aftenposten declaring ‘Sometimes, as a reviewer, one forgets a work’s failings and mistakes and becomes completely absorbed by an insistent narrative voice. That’s the case with Gine Cornelia Pedersen’s début, a firework out of control: sparks fly all over the place and the rocket could strike anywhere – and does…’ Elsewhere described by the Norwegian press as ‘like listening to a punk-rock single’, Zero finds its young, female protagonist constantly tornbetween hope and despair, rage and confusion, as she tries to find her place in and, eventually, far outwith, society.

Inlands is the story of a young woman moving from Stockholm to a small community on the edge of the Arctic Circle, to her boyfriend’s home town. But when their relationship ends shortly after her arrival, she decides not to return to the city. It’s a brilliantly wrought piece of fiction, an account of our protagonists’s struggles to adjust to new customs, with a quiet poetry to the descriptions of her experience in the alternating endless sunlight and bitter cold of the Swedish inlands.

A young man writes a letter to the woman who rejected him. Driven by doubt and unbridled desire, he tries to write himself to a new understanding of his loneliness.At the same time, he suspects literature is to blame for all of this.

He therefore dreams of literature that cures the need for literature, literature where life has precedence.Restless is a disobedient short novel, narrated by aphorisms and small episodes of everyday life, conveyed by a presence and an intensity that never folds back to a personal darkness.

Restless also contains remains of an almost extinct classic ideal. At least hope: Books can make us better people.

“I only have one book in me, after all. It’s called “How I Learned to Love,” and I hope to write it over and over again, with little variations until I die. “

A regional office supplies magnate who yearns to be a poet.

A purchasing manager who sees big city life as the route to avoiding school reunion shame.

An interior design fanatic who needs to make up her mind about a contentious mug.

We’ll Call You is a collection of nine stories of the aspirations, self-deception, apathy and despair of the modern job interview, written by Jacob Sundberg, a communications officer and freelance writer.

Copenhagen, 1930. There is a ring at the door of Ole Jastrau's fifth floor apartment that will ignite a spark of restlessness within his soul, leading him into darkened velvet portiere-entranced bars and brightly glittering night clubs, from the mundane grind of literary criticism to the nocturnal otherworld of alcoholism and prostitution.

Originally deemed a cynical, pessimistic - and, above all, overly revealing - portrayal of life as a newspaperman upon its release in interwar Denmark, Havoc has since gone on to become a much loved modern classic in its home country, with its ‘longed for shipwrecks' verse becoming one of the most oft quoted in the Danish language.

Will Jastrau re-emerge into polite society, or sink to a place from where he will never resurface?

Transfer Window is a utopian vision of the wealthy suburbs north of Copenhagen as a luxurious hospice. Everyone wears white. New-age nuns grow organic cannabis on the beach. The internet and music are forbidden, but you can swim in the icy sea in the winter. In amongst it all come the crushing memories of life as a terminal cancer patient, otherwise our narrator and her friend Mikkel hang out, talking about the 80s and about how they would prefer to die. They also laugh at the mistakes of the healthy.