An autumn night in 1891, Kristina Andersson drowns her two sleeping children in the Aura river. When their pale faces have faded from view she rows home. The next morning regret sets in, but it’s too late. Kristina is sent to the asylum on Själö, an island in the Åbo archipelago. It’s a place few ever leave.

Forty years later, it’s seventeen-year-old Elli’s turn. The daughter of a bourgeois family, Elli wants something more than what the rigid structure of her family home can offer. She gets a summer job at an office, falls head over heels in love and runs away only to be embroiled in a Bonnie and Clyde-style set-up by a spurned lover. When she’s caught she too is brought to Själö, where time seems to have come to a standstill. The nurse Sigrid becomes the link between Kristina and Elli, the old and the new. But time is threatening to catch up with Själö and its inhabitants. War is brewing in Europe and will soon touch their shores too.

Johanna Holmström’s evocative and striking tale Island of Souls has its basis in reality and the tragic human fates that permeated the walls of the real-life asylum on Själö. Island of Souls is a novel about motherhood, the evil, the good, and the utterly ordinary. About the price that three women must pay for their weakness, longing, love, sorrow and friendship. But most of all perhaps, it is a book about madness, and how its definition has shifted as it has been used on women throughout time.

The restaurant The Hills stands at the center of Matias Faldbakken’s new novel, a story of waiters and regulars, chandeliers and cloakroom attendants, mezzanines and storage cellars, bar managers and in-house pianists. It’s a continental interior that greets the visitor as they enter the premises, a downtrodden mosaic of concentric circles on the floor and walls covered in portraits, drawings, paintings and stamps. The one who guides the reader through this landscape is a waiter at the establishment, a veteran of thirteen years. With utter discretion and a complete knowledge of all that goes on in his domain, he is the eyes and ears of the novel.

The ideas and ambience of old Europe are carefully guarded at the run-down restaurant. A well-established order wherein everything has its place rules, and little to nothing of the outside world intrudes. Until the threat of unrest and change comes anyway, in the innocuous form of a young woman quietly taking a seat among the regulars.

The Hills is an unexpected, smart and entertaining novel about collapsing structures and a world caught somewhere between diligence and decay. Matias Faldbakken possesses a rare talent for observation and an uncompromising eye for detail and humor as he pushes the performances of the novel to the point of absurdity, and does so in a manner that evokes a sense of unease as well as gravity.

It’s that time of the year. For the twenty-fourth time, William Wisting gets out the papers from when Katharina Haugen disappeared. The case was never solved, and every year since Wisting has called on Katharina’s husband, Martin Haugen. The steady contact between the police inspector and the bereaved husband has over the years developed into a friendship. But this year, Haugen’s house stands empty and dark when Wisting arrives. On the anniversary of his wife’s disappearance, Martin Haugen has gone missing.

The same day, Kripos investigator Adrian Stiller comes to see Wisting. A young cold case investigator for the National Criminal Investigation Service (Kripos), Stiller has uncovered a connection between Katharina’s disappearance and the missing person case he’s working on. The two must join efforts, but the collaboration with the complex Stiller will be a challenge for the experienced Wisting. The two driven investigators must all the same find a starting point they can agree on, and use their combined capabilities to solve the case.

The Katharina Code is the first installment in Jørn Lier Horst’s compelling new crime fiction series, the Cold Case Quartet.

Kristina Ohlsson’s Buried Lies celebrates its 20th consecutive week on Der Spiegel’s bestseller list for paperbacks in Germany, where it comes in at No. 5.