Sunday 22 November 2009

Book of the Week and bibliography - Johan Theorin, The Darkest Room


Nothing especially takes my eye in this week’s book releases, so I have selected a book released earlier this year. Scandinavian Crime Fiction is on a high at the moment, and I particularly recommend Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. Johan Theorin is a relatively new exponent on the scene, with two novels released in the UK. Theorin is a journalist and author, born in 1963 in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he still lives. Throughout his life, he has been a regular visitor to the island of Öland in the Baltic sea. His mother’s family – sailors, fishermen and farmers – have lived there for centuries, nurturing the island’s rich legacy of strange tales and folklore. His first novel was Echoes from the Dead (originally published in Sweden as Skumtimmen by Wahlström & Widstrand). In 2007 it was voted Best First Mystery Novel by the authors and critics of the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy, and it has been sold to eighteen countries. It was awarded the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger in the UK in 2009. His second novel, The Darkest Room, (in Swedish Nattfåk) was voted the Best Swedish Crime Novel of 2008 and won the Glass Key award for Scandinavian Crime Fiction in 2009. The books form the first half of a loose quartet of novels set on the island of Öland, with each one intended to take its mood from one of the four seasons on the island. Both books were published in softcover only in the UK by Doubleday, and first printings do not seem widely available. Now is a good time to pick both up at cover price if you are lucky.



Bibliography


Echoes from the Dead - Doubleday, 2008
The Darkest Room - Doubleday, 2009

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