SAS: Rise of the Black Swan, the action film directed by Magnus Martens based on Andy McNab’s novel Red Notice, premiered on Netflix on this Friday and is the second most watched movie in the US this weekend.

The film stars Sam Heughan (Outlander), Ruby Rose (Batwoman), Andy Serkis (Planet of the Apes), Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton) and Hannah John-Kamen (Ready Player One) and follows a band of criminals as they hijack the Eurostar train with 400 hostages on board, deep beneath the English Channel where they plan to detonate an explosion, ushering in an economic war on the government. Unbeknownst to the criminals, injured Special Air Service off-duty officer Tom Buckingham is on board the train as well, and he will stop at nothing to thwart the terrorist attack.

Ahead of its publication, Marvin Mellow and Peas on Earth has garnered Bobbie Peers his second nomination for Ark’s Children’s Book Award 2021. Peers previously won the sought-after award in 2015 for William Wenton and the Luridium Thief. The annual literary prize is bestowed upon the children’s book of the year and the ultimate winner is selected by over 10,000 children in grades 5-7. The award ceremony will be held in Oslo in November.

Marvin Mellow is a strikingly ordinary boy. He gets pushed around by nasty bullies at school and dreams of becoming a YouTube star. Then one day his life takes an unexpected turn when he discovers a peculiar metal egg in his garden and befriends the alien Peas. From then on, nothing is ordinary!

A wild and laugh-out-loud funny story for middle grade readers, featuring Marvin Mellow, Fred, Principal Tor, the bullies Irmeline and Fluffy, action heroes, stunt men, dating, aliens, fame, bagpipe music and friendship. Ahead of its release Marvin Mellow and Peas on Earth has landed Bobbie Peers his second nomination for the sought-after Ark’s Children’s Book Award for children’s book of the year.

Jørn Lier Horst’s long-running bestseller A Question of Guilt is No. 1 on week 33’s paperback list. Horst is joined by Kristina Ohlsson, whose just published Storm Watch debuts at No. 4 on the e-book list.

On Tuesday, Jo Nesbø and climate activist Greta Thunberg appeared together in an exclusive conversation at the Edinburgh TV Festival, in the fest’s Worldview Address slot, to discuss the climate crisis and the creative industry’s responsibility towards sustainability and a greener future and how writers and producers need to tackle it through storytelling.

The Edinburgh TV Festival is the largest media event of its kind in the UK, attracting several thousand delegates from the UK, rest of Europe and the US.

The festival’s creative director Stewart Clarke says about the event:

“It really was a long-term goal to get Greta Thunberg and get her to talk about what the responsibility is of the TV world of storytelling, for storytellers, and more than that, to frame things in a positive way in terms of how positive change can be effected, and what was great was to be able to pair her up with Jo Nesbo, the author who has spoken about this before. That’s an amazing matchup.”

Please click “read more” below to watch the event.

Furia, the original crime thriller created by Gjermund Stenberg Eriksen and directed by Magnus Martens, is in the running for the Grand Prize for ‘Best Series’ at Series Mania’s International Competition.

Furia: On the run from his past and with a new identity, the cop Asgeir moves with his daughter to an idyllic small town in western Norway. A conflict at the local refugee center leads Asgeir to encounter the mysterious Ragna, the owner of a dire secret. She is Furia, a far-right writer spreading dark and sinister opinions to a global audience. A tragic murder puts both Asgeir and Ragna in danger, revealing forces in Norway and Europe far more dangerous than a small-town murder.

Taking place in Lille, France, on August 26 – September 2, Series Mania will also be where Furia has its world premiere.

Liza Marklund radically reinvented the crime fiction genre in the late 90s with her legendary The Bomber, featuring crime reporter Annika Bengtzon. With her brand new novel The Polar Circle, a psychological thriller in the darkly humorous vein of Big Little Lies, she is once again breaking new ground in the genre.

Lolita. Roots. The Thorn Birds. Cop Killer. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It’s an eclectic mix of titles that reflects five distinct personalities on the cusp of adulthood, womanhood, and a permanent, deadly change. Welcome to the book club THE POLAR CIRCLE.

Travel north, to the quiet village of Stenträsk, where a crumbling bridge reveals its secret for the first time in forty years. A young woman’s headless body, preserved since the summer of 1980. What happened that August when one of the girls went missing, and how did it change the members of the book club The Polar Circle? What were their secrets, and which ones will come to light now?

The Polar Circle is the first installment in Liza Marklund’s Polar Circle Trilogy, and a riveting deep dive into the minds of five women – as they were then, girls about to graduate high school, and as they are now: mothers, widowed, closeted, ambitious, overlooked. Sex, jealousy, and the drive to escape one’s small-town roots had already predetermined the end of their girlhood alliance-slash-friendship. But what was it that demanded the life of one of them before they parted?

This is a thriller from the deepest north of Sweden, where Liza herself spent her formative teenage years in the ‘80s, just like the girls in the novel. Revisiting that time and place in The Polar Circle makes this remarkable and deeply personal novel dense with authenticity and presence.

The Book That Really Did Not Want To Be Read promises to give its readers EVEN MORE trouble than its predecessor – watch out or you’re bound to get bitten! Filled with even more delightful and laugh-inducing read-out-loud hilarity, the book is an ode to the power of words and the togetherness of reading. This book will force its readers to monkey around, decipher a thing or two, and even say some nice things. It’s going to get sweaty, but it will be worth it!

The Book That Really Did Not Want To Be Read is the stand-alone sequel to mega hit The Book That Did Not Want To Be Read, that became the No. 1 bestselling children’s book title of 2020 in its native Sweden.