world: sweden | From the Heart of Europe

See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Sweden.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

This was pretty straightforward; there is not much doubt about what books are set in Sweden, and there was not really much doubt about which book was going to win.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo	Stieg Larsson	3,459,224	47,185	155,356
A Man Called Ove	Fredrik Backman	1,222,085	13,882	136,951
The Girl Who Played with Fire	Stieg Larsson	989,205	33,154	70,309
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest	Stieg Larsson	778,147	27,654	57,445
Anxious People	Fredrik Backman	816,177	6,363	128,278
Beartown	Fredrik Backman	606,932	5,788	93,031
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared	Jonas Jonasson	304,460	8,752	29,072
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry	Fredrik Backman	291,256	5,675	35,205

This week’s winner, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is the first of a trilogy published after the author’s death, about a punk computer genius who helps the viewpoint character Solve Crime. It’s violent, sexy and compelling. The other two books of the trilogy also make the list.

Fredrik Backmann’s books, four of which are on the list, are slice-of-life stories from contemporary Sweden, some of which I suspect may be funny.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is another slice-of-life story with a humorous tone. I was not quite sure if it met my geographical criteria, but I got a friend who has a copy to count the chapters (thanks, Mike!) and indeed a majority of it is set in-country.

One surprising thing jumps out at me from this list. All eight of the books are by men, ironically for a post on International Women’s Day. Looking through my archives, this has happened four times before: Russia, South Africa, Colombia (a special case) and Spain. Also, for two of the countries where I was only able to compile a list of five rather than eight books, all five were by male authors: Uzbekistan and Guinea-Conakry. On the other hand, I’ve had seven countries where seven of the eight books were by women (nowhere yet has had a clean sweep on that side).

This turns out to be thanks to my including the StoryGraph numbers. On Goodreads and LibraryThing alone, Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren would have made the list; but My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, by Fredrik Backman, has more than twice as many owners on StoryGraph and nipped into the eighth place. Backman is relatively more popular with StoryGraph users; indeed his top two books are very close behind The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo there.

It’s also quite a turnaround from my previous research in 2015, where the only books that scored were the Stieg Larsson trilogy and Pippi Longstocking. Obviously the recent surge in popularity of Fredrik Backmann had not yet taken off at that point. Perhaps surprisingly, Henning Mankel was quite a long way down, both in 2015 and in 2026. The next highest woman writer after Astrid Lindgren was Camilla Läckberg.

For once, I did not disqualify any books – the top eight from my calculations are all set mainly in Sweden. Other countries where I did not disqualifiy any books: Japan, Egypt, DRC, Vietnam, Colombia.

Coming next: three more European countries – Czechia, Azerbaijan and Portugal – followed by Togo.

Second paragraph of third story (“Never in Real Life” / “Aldrig i verkligheten”, by Åke Edwardson):

Hon läste kartan. Hon var faktiskt bra på det. De kom längre och längre bort från civilisationen men hon missade inte en avtagsväg.

She read the map. She was actually good at it. They drove farther and farther away from civilization, but she never missed a turn.

I got this in advance of Worldcon 75 because John-Henri Holmberg was one of the guests of honour in Helsinki. I know him vaguely because we have ended up on panels together at all three European Worldcons this century, but this was my chance to get into his work. Which I then failed to do in advance of the convention – who knew that running the Hugo Awards takes up quite a lot of one’s spare time???

It’s an anthology of seventeen short stories by Swedish writers, all of them about crime and detection rather than sf or fantasy. Authors include a couple I had heard of, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, and lots more whose names were new to me. Good gender balance. Almost all the stories are set in Sweden, which has been on my mind recently because it is about to assume the EU presidency.

Brief parenthesis: I’ve been to Sweden precisely four times in my life, three of them with my sister. We passed through Stockholm by train in 1990 to and from a visit to Finland, and then I happened to coincide with her when I attended a conference there in April 2006. A year before that, in May 2005, I attended a NATO conference in the skiing resort of Åre, without my sister but with several foreign ministers, and panelled with the stars.

Left to right:
James Elles, MEP
Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, foreign minister of Croatia and later President of Croatia
Pierre Lellouche, member of the French National Assembly, later trade minister and EU minister
Dimitrij Rupel, foreign minister of Slovenia
Nicholas Burns, then Under Secretary for Political Affairs in the US State Department, now US ambassador to China
Kastriot Islami, foreign minister of Albania
me

Going back to the anthology, the weakest story is unfortunately the one by Stieg Larsson, later famous for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, but he was only 17 when he wrote it (and would probably have blocked its publication if he had still been alive). But the rest are generally good, some very good. At short length you can’t fit in a lot of detection, so more often than not the stories are from the perpetrator’s point of view, but with some interesting twists. The cold revenge of the protagonist of Inger Frimansson’s “In Our Darkened House” will linger with me. A good read. You can get it here.

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Tag Archives: world: sweden

The best known books set in each country: Sweden

A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg