Looking for a good mid-winter read?

If you want a good novel during the cold winter months, we highly recommend “Swede Hollow” by Swedish author Ola Larsmo.

It tells the story of a Swedish shantytown in a valley in what became downtown St Paul Minnesota in the late 1800s during the great emigration, where over 1,000 Swedish immigrants lived in tumble-down shacks.

This spellbinding novel depicts the struggles of Swedish immigrant life for many decades in their attempts to establish themselves in the new world. The novel came out in Swedish in 2016, and has now at last been published in English.  We consider it to be one of the best novels on the topic of the great Swedish emigration since the publication of Wilhelm Mobergs trilogy on The Emigrants.