Markus Lutteman's 'El Choco' is not a literary experience. But it is a fascinating journey into a world that is best experienced from a distance. After a failed drug smuggling operation, Jonas Andersson ends up in the notorious San Pedro prison in Bolivia. There are no locks on the cells and no guards. The violent and armed prisoners rule the roost.
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Last read: Annika Östberg's account of her 28 years in an American prison and her journey to and from there. Initially, we meet a 13-year-old who is unhappy in her new home country, runs away from home, meets the wrong boys and gets hooked on drugs. Annika is sentenced to "25 years to life" for accessory to murder.
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Himmelsdalen, by Marie Hermansson, is defined as a suspense novel. And indeed, this is a page-turner! Swedish Daniel receives a letter from his twin brother Max, who is in a "rehabilitation clinic" in the Alps. Daniel travels to visit his brother at the exclusive clinic, but soon discovers that nothing is as it first seemed.
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I have read the book "Almost Home" by Jean Kwok. When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to the United States, they think they will be better off. Instead, they end up in an unimaginable slum in Brooklyn: an apartment with no heat, but with cockroaches and mice, and work around the clock.
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During my flu season I have been reading Tina Thunander's "Travelling in Sharialand. A report on women's lives in Saudi Arabia". Tina is quite lost when she lands in the kingdom, but is soon given a lesson in the state of affairs by the Ministry of Information's envoy.
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When I read Sofi Oksanen's Purge, I found her storytelling to be magical. Her debut novel Stalin's Cows did not disappoint either. The language here is perhaps even more straightforward, and a little less polished, as it rushes across the pages.
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Morning in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa, can be seen as a contribution to the infected Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and as an outside media consumer it is difficult to understand all aspects of it. However, it is not difficult to follow the protagonist Amal and how her increasingly decimated family makes its way through decades of conflict, war, displacement and refugeeism.
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I started reading Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay, and then I didn't want to put it down. When the French police knock on Sarah's family's door in Paris in 1942, she hides her little brother in the closet, locks the door and puts the key in her pocket ...
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I have just read, and can recommend, Niceville by Kathryn Stockett. The book follows three women, the white socialite Skeeter and the two black maids Aibileen and Minny, in the American South in the 1960s.
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Here is a book tip that is also a film tip. Li Cunxin grows up as a poor peasant boy in communist China. His family barely has enough food for the day, but he learns early on that, thanks to Chairman Mao, he lives in the richest country in the world. Imagine how terrible the people in the capitalist world must be!
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