Witches' Rings portrays the history of a rural society in a new light, tracing its development through the lives of working class women and children rather than authorities and decision-makers. The central character is a woman so anonymous that her name is not even mentioned on her gravestone. This novel, written in 1974 and now published for the first time in English, is the first volume of a tetralogy which follows a Swedish community through a hundred years of recent history to the present day.

Kerstin Ekman's novel Blackwater took the world by storm in 1993 and has now been translated into over twenty-five languages. But her reputation as one of Sweden's best-known and most successful authors rests just as securely upon the series of four novels she wrote between 1974 and 1983, which are based on the author's childhood home town of Katrineholm some forty miles southwest of Stockholm. The first of these, Witches' Rings, which portrays the final years of the nineteenth century in a small urban community on the cusp of industrialisation, was published by Norvik Press in 1997. The Spring, which focuses on the lives of three women, Tora, Frida and Ingrid, moves the story on from the early twentieth century to the interwar years. According to Ekman herself, two major socio-psychological studies carried out in Katrineholm indicate 'that this was a community with which its inhabitants were content... I have devoted eleven years of my life to maintaining the exact opposite.' This is accomplished in a narrative of great subtlety and compelling power; once again Kerstin Ekman recreates the past with an authenticity that resonates urgently in the present.

The Angel House is the third in the remarkable series of free-standing novels that cemented Kerstin Ekman's reputation in her native Sweden during the 1970s, long before she achieved world-wide success with novels like Blackwater and The Forest of Hours. It follows the fortunes of the inhabitants of a provincial Swedish town familiar from the previous two books in the sequence, Witches' Rings and The Spring, from the late 1920s to the Second World War, when events beyond the boundaries of neutral Sweden threaten to disrupt the regular rhythms of life. With this sequence of novels focussing primarily on the lives of ordinary women, Kerstin Ekman provides an alternative, subversive history of the community in which she grew up, and gives a finely-drawn portrait of a town in transition. The Angel House is published here for the first time in English in a translation by Sarah Death, an acknowledged expert on Kerstin Ekman's work.

Ann-Marie is a middle-aged woman returning from Portugal to the Swedish town in which she grew up in order to sell the old house she has inherited from her father. Memories of the past are everywhere, ensnaring her. She ends up staying in the house, alone with her memories of her father, an idiosyncratic character whom only she truly understood. She is also nervously awaiting the arrival of her daughter, and now realises that she has never really tried to understand her. With this eloquent and gripping story Kerstin Ekman concludes her epic sequence of novels, Women and the City (whose earlier volumes Witches' Rings, The Spring and The Angel House are also available from Norvik Press). City of Light is an intensely moving novel about love, in a rich and unusual variety of forms, and also a sensitive and thoughtful depiction of the way in which human beings approach life and one another.

Kerstin Ekman is primarily known as a novelist, but she has occasionally turned to free verse, especially when the subject is autobiographical. In 1993-1994, Swedish TV 1 conducted a series of talks with prominent writers under the rubric 'Seven Boys and Seven Girls'. In place of an ordinary interview, Kerstin Ekman read aloud Barndom (Childhood). The poem, which was published for the first time in Swedish Book Review in 1995, appears here with original photographs kindly provided by the author. The prose passages are quotations from Ekman's 1988 novel Rovarna i Skuleskogen (The Forest of Hours).

When Hillevi, a young, inexperienced midwife, moves from the university town of Uppsala to the wilderness of Svartvattnet (Blackwater) to be with her unofficial fiance, she is ill prepared for what awaits her. In this frigid, austere, and isolated territory, she encounters the overwhelming and unpredictable forces of nature and demoralizing poverty and ignorance while also gaining access to the unfamiliar world of nomadic Sami reindeer herders. A single traumatic event, never fully confronted, has devastating and far-reaching repercussions, but Hillevi also finds unexpected warmth and love. Incorporating elements of the "jojk" oral tradition of Sami culture, "God's Mercy" is a thoroughly engrossing story about the capriciousness of memory, the resilience of the human psyche, and the endless wonder of the wild.

On Midsummer's Eve, 1974, Annie Raft arrives with her daughter Mia in the remote Swedish village of Blackwater to join her lover Dan on a nearby commune. On her journey through the deep forest, she sumbles upon the site of a grisly double murder--a crime that will remain unsolved for nearly twenty years, until the day Annie sees her grown daughter in the arms of one man she glimpsed in the forest that eerie midsummer night.
Like" Gorky Park "and "Smilla's Sense of Snow, Blackwater" is a unique trhiller in which the hearts and minds of the characters are as strikingly compelling as the exotic northern landscape that envelops them.

From the author of the highly acclaimed" Blackwater" comes a beautiful fable exploring the bond between a man and a dog In the heart of the tranquil countryside, a young puppy leaves his home to eagerly follow his mother and master. But away from the safe haven of the farm, the puppy soon becomes lost and is left to struggle for survival in the wild. Suddenly, he must find food and a safe place to sleep, and outwit his competitor, the fox. The puppy becomes wild himself, trusting no human and furiously fighting the hunting dogs that enter his domain. But one man is intrigued by the now-unruly dog and very slowly begins to gain his trust. Each day he visits the dog, bringing food and awakening memories of his distant domestic past. The lost relationship between man and dog is rebuilt in this sensitive and intelligent story about the true nature of trust and friendship.

Midsummer eve, 1974, in the far north of Sweden. Annie Raft arrives with her six-year-old daughter in a small town called Blackwater to join her lover Dan on a commune. But Dan is not there to meet them. Panicking, Annie treks into the wilderness to find the commune, in the strange, hovering light of midsummer night. By the river, she finds a tent;and inside it two bodies hideously murdered - stabbed so violently that the feathers from their sleeping bag scatter the ground. Many years later, Annie has settled in the region, and Mia, her daughter has grown up. Early one morning glimpses Mia in the arms of the man she believes responsible for the murders. The seemingly inexplicable crime, long buried, is forced to come to its own dark and unexpected conclusion.