What to read: Scandinavian noir for teens, a novel about a crisis of masculinity, and a Stockholm odyssey
Realnoe Vremya selects three February book releases
Literary columnist for Realnoe Vremya, Yekaterina Petrova, has selected three new books released in February — about an orphan who assists the police in snow-covered 19th-century Stockholm; about a troubled teenager who, over a few nighttime hours, journeys through his own guilt and fear; and about a man wandering around Odenplan with children's mittens in his pocket and his own past behind him.
Johan Rundberg. “The Night Raven," Belaya Vorona (translated from Swedish by Maria Lyudkovskaya, 160 pp., 12+)
The novel “The Night Raven” is the first book in the series about Mika and Hoffe by Swedish writer Johan Rundberg. The author was born in 1973, lives in Stockholm, and writes for children and teenagers. For this book, he received the August Prize in 2021 and the Astrid Lindgren Award in 2023 for his contribution to children's and young adult literature. Initially, Rundberg planned a contemporary story about a child from the lower classes who helps the police. The decision to move the action to the 19th century came after visiting Långholmen Central Prison. A cell built in 1880 in a “modern” complex at the time set the historical framework. The author studied the urban environment of the 1880s to accurately reproduce details. Almost all locations in the book are real places in Stockholm; only the pub “The Chapel," where Mika works part-time, remains fictional.
The action unfolds in the winter of 1880. Twelve-year-old Mika has lived in the city orphanage since infancy. She has no surname and has never attended school. One night, a boy appears on the orphanage's doorstep holding an infant. He hands the baby to Mika, mentions the “Black Angel," and disappears. That same night, a murder occurs. Mika writes the official report about the foundling, and her keen observation catches the attention of Detective Waldemar Hoff. He is investigating a murder that bears the hallmarks of the “Night Raven” — a serial killer executed a year earlier. If the criminal is dead, why are the crimes continuing? Mika gets involved in the investigation. Her tools are attention to detail and a network of connections with former orphanage residents now living on the streets. She is used to noticing small things because it's her way of surviving. The book shows Mika's conclusions are built on logic and facts, not intuition. Hoff is a sharp, straightforward policeman with a rigid sense of justice. His worldview differs from Mika's, and this is revealed in their dialogues through tension and humor. The word “ragamuffin” sounds like an affectionate nickname to him, but to her, it's a stigma.
The city in the novel is a confined space. Snow has blocked the roads; no one can leave the city or enter it. Food and firewood supplies at the orphanage are running low. The text contains scenes with harsh details, but violence often remains outside direct description. Fear stems from the plot, not as an effect. Mika is not a “fairytale” heroine. She is brave because she has to be. Her humor helps distract the younger children from hunger. She doesn't know her own history and gradually tries to get closer to it. The underlying thread of searching for the past runs through the entire series, although each investigation is concluded within a single book. To date, Rundberg has written five parts of the series, with two translated into Russian.
“The Night Raven” is embedded in the Scandinavian noir tradition but is aimed at teenagers aged 10-14. However, adults also read the book. The reader gains an experience of a historical investigation in a specific urban environment: real streets, a prison, social stratification, police corruption, and life in the orphanage. Incidentally, tours are given in Stockholm to locations from the novel, including the very prison cell where the book's idea originated. After reading, one is left with a feeling of hope, despite the cold, the murders, and the isolated city.
Max Porter. “Shy," NoAge (translated from English by Sergey Karpov, 144 pp., 18+)
The novel “Shy” is the fourth book by British writer Max Porter, published in the original language in 2023. Porter is an author, bookseller, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and chair of the 2025 International Booker Prize judging panel. His debut “Grief Is the Thing with Feathers” was published in 2015 and was adapted into a film titled “The Essence” in 2025. In the same year, “Shy” received its own film version — the drama “Steve” starring Cillian Murphy. The novel is set in England in 1995 and takes place over a few nighttime hours. A sixteen-year-old teenager, nicknamed Shy, attends a boarding school called “Last Chance," an institution for troubled youth. At night, he leaves the building, takes a cassette player and a backpack filled with stones, and heads towards a lake. The reader understands his intention from the first pages. The external route is simple, but the real space of the book is the hero's consciousness.
Shy is a teenager with a long list of offenses: fights, thefts, vandalism, arrests. He cut a classmate's forehead with a broken bottle, trashed the house of acquaintances who gave him a key in case “things got really bad," banged his head on a table. He remembers these episodes in detail and returns to them again and again. However, the author doesn't attach medical labels or construct a convenient cause-and-effect scheme. There is no explanatory backstory about trauma or abuse in the text. There is a mother and stepfather trying to help, there are school staff who tell him: “Your spring is still ahead.” Porter leaves the question open: what exactly does this teenager need, and what is society willing to give him? The book's structure reflects the chaos of the hero's thinking. Prose mixes with verse, different fonts and layouts are used. The text jumps between fragments of thoughts, fears, shame, and anger. This isn't a stylistic gesture for its own sake: it conveys the movement of consciousness, where reality and imagination constantly touch.
Music is a key element of the book. The player plays hip-hop and drum and bass from the 1990s. The rhythm of the tracks permeates the phrases, and the novel's language absorbs the lexicon of the 1995 teenage environment. The natural environment is also important. On the way to the lake, Shy sees white patches in the field that could be stones or animals, stops by the water where decomposing badger carcasses float. These scenes connect the physical world and the hero's inner state. For Porter, nature acts as a mediator between man and something larger.
The novel raises the theme of a crisis of masculinity. Porter speaks of a systemic failure, a lack of conversation about male vulnerability, and closed youth clubs. There's no documentary style in the book, but there is a teenager who is aware of his actions and cannot hold his thoughts in a stable form. The book doesn't follow a straight line from cause to effect; it leaves room for empathy. On a formal level, “Shy” demonstrates how to work with textual economy: 144 pages encompass years of mistakes, guilt, attempts at help, and brief flashes of clarity. The finale, where classmates and staff reach out to the hero, is embedded in the author's logic of compassion. “Shy” is a short novel about a few hours that compress a biography and pose a direct question: what to do with a young man who is simultaneously sensitive and dangerous?
Daniel Gustafsson. “Odenplan," “Inostrannaya literature” (translated from Swedish by Lydia Starodubtseva, 240 pp., 18+)
The novel “Odenplan” is the debut book by Swedish writer and translator Daniel Gustafsson, published in Swedish in 2019 and nominated for the August Prize. Gustafsson was born in 1972, translates from Hungarian and English, and is a laureate of the Swedish Academy and the “Translation of the Year” award for his work on the prose of László Krasznahorkai. Before writing the novel, Gustafsson was known as a translator of Attila Bartis, Krisztina Tóth, Péter Gárdos, Elvis Costello, and Garth Greenwell. The novel was first published in Russian in the journal “Inostrannaya Literatura” in 2024.
The action of the book takes place over a single day in autumn in Stockholm, in the neighborhoods around Odenplan metro station. In the morning, a man wakes up next to his seven-year-old son, whom he hasn't seen for a long time. He has gone through a divorce, is on extended sick leave due to burnout, abuses alcohol, and lives in a temporary apartment in Vasastan. He needs to take his son to school. On the way, it turns out the boy forgot his mittens. The man buys new ones and tries to make it in time for recess, but the day begins to unravel. A stream of consciousness takes over.
The hero wanders through the city and through his own memory. He goes into a library, a café, a hospital for an ultrasound due to psychosomatic pains, and a rented storage unit. He almost gets hit by a car, saved by a teenager. He is mistaken for a burglar. He looks at shop windows, ponders the production chains of mittens and underwear. He observes a woman with a nosebleed, an old man with a walker, a dead mouse. Each stop pulls memories with it: work in Pristina, cultural projects in Kosovo, meeting his future wife, his son's swimming lessons, trips to Hungarian relatives. The city acts as a second protagonist. The Odenplan district is described in long sentences that follow the narrator's gaze: the blue fence of the new metro line construction, grocery stores, new restaurants, and old antique shops. Life goes on above and below ground. The environment is changing, and the text captures the details of this transformation.
The novel continues the “one day” tradition — from Joyce's “Ulysses” to Virginia Woolf. The book is directly correlated with Leopold Bloom's walk. Echoes of Strindberg and Central European prose sound throughout, and Wittgenstein is mentioned. Some episodes unfold in the conditional mood — as a list of what “might have” happened. Syntax stretches over pages, the narrative moves in the third person, transitions between past and present occur seamlessly. Themes are broadly set: fatherhood, vulnerability, masculinity, immigration, alcoholism, the position of the middle class balancing on a fine line. The father wants to be close to his son but loses focus. The child, however, proves more resilient. The finale returns to the starting point: the late father picks up the boy; they embrace and cry.
Yekaterina Petrova is a literary columnist for the online newspaper Realnoe Vremya and hosts the Telegram channel «Булочки с маком».