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For the month of January 2023 we have 13 known books for this time period. I will add any that become known to us. Good reading.

1) The Fires: A Novel by Sigríður Hagalín Björnsdóttir to be published on the 1st of January 2023. Iceland.

A volcanologist discovers herself in the face of nature’s fury in this heartrending thriller.

Anna Arnardóttir has fire in her blood. A second-generation volcanologist, she’s Iceland’s leading expert on the fire-breathing giants that could, without warning, reduce a country to ash.

Her work regularly puts her in harm’s way, but Anna never takes unnecessary risks, living an orderly, suburban life with her tax-lawyer husband and children. Then a series of earthquakes rocks Reykjavík, and Anna’s stable life is suddenly on shaky ground when she falls for Tómas Adler, a bohemian photographer. As Anna tumbles into a passionate affair, the earthquakes take a violent turn. Small volcanic eruptions herald disaster to come, but will she trust what she knows in her heart is about to happen? Or listen to her head and risk the safety of the entire nation? Having so much of her world and what she knows about herself upended, can she trust her instincts?

The Fires is a lyrical, heart-stopping tale of survival and self-discovery about one woman’s reckoning with all she holds sacred—though it will take every fiber of her being.

2) Chicken Wing by Christoffer Petersen to be published on the 2nd of January 2023. Greenland.

A wager is a wager, and when Ukaliina Nakinngi gets out of her depth in a ‘friendly� game of volleyball, the only way to pay off her debt is to reach for the skies and push the envelope!

Climb into the cockpit with Greenlandic fighter pilot Ukaliina “Sled Dog� Nakinngi in this short, adrenaline-fuelled story set in the Arctic and America, and join self-confessed Top Gun fanboy Christoffer Petersen in this tongue-in-cheek adventure from Greenland.

3) Blaze Me a Sun by Christoffer Carlsson to be published on the 3rd of January 2023. Sweden.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER � A serial killer in a small Swedish town commits his first murder the same night the prime minister is assassinated in this haunting, cinematic novel about the legacy of violence and a community's collective guilt by one of Scandinavia's most celebrated young crime writers.

In February 1986, the Halland police receive a call from a man who claims to have attacked his first victim. I’m going to do it again, he says before the line cuts off. By the time policeman Sven Jörgensson reaches the crime scene, the woman is taking her last breath. For Sven, this will prove a decisive moment. On the same night, Sweden plunges into a state of shock after the murder of the prime minister. Could there possibly be a connection?

As Sven becomes obsessed with the case, two more fall victim. For years Sven remains haunted by the murders he cannot solve, fearing that the killer might strike again. Eventually Sven retires from the police in defeat. Having failed to catch the killer, he passes his obsession to his son, who has joined the force to be closer to his father.

Decades later, the case unexpectedly resurfaces when a novelist returns home to Halland after a failed marriage and sputtering career. The writer befriends a retired police officer, a former colleague of Sven's, who helps the novelist--our narrator--unspool the many strands of this engrossing tale about a community confronting its shames.

Blaze Me a Sun is an elegantly constructed novel about the long shadows of violence and the elusive hunt for truth. A #1 bestseller in Sweden, it marks the American debut of the youngest winner of the Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year award, the top prize for Swedish crime writers whose past winners include Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell.

4) In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays by Karl Ove Knausgaard to be published on the 10th of January 2023. Norway and Sweden.

From the New York Times bestselling author of the My Struggle series comes a collection of ambitious, remarkably erudite essays on art, literature, culture, and philosophy.

In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. In these wide-ranging pieces, he reflects openly and with penetrating intelligence on Ingmar Bergman's notebooks, Anselm Kiefer, the northern lights, Madame Bovary, Rembrandt, and the role of an editor. Accompanied by black-and-white reproductions throughout, these essays illuminate Cindy Sherman's shadowlands, the sublime mystery of Sally Mann's vision, and the serious play of Francesca Woodman. They capture Knausgaard's remarkable ability to mediate between the personal and the universal, between life and art. Each piece glimmers with his candor and his longing to authentically see, understand, and experience the world.

5) You Will Never Be Found Tove Alsterdal to be published on the 10th of January 2023. Sweden.

Detective Eira Sjodin, introduced in the electrifying Swedish crime thriller We Know You Remember, races to solve a disappearance that hits chillingly close to home in the second book in the High Coast series, hailed by People as “Nordic noir at its best.�

In the small mining town of Malmberget, north of the Arctic Circle, residents and their houses are being relocated. As the mine that built the town slowly swallows it street by street, building by building, the memories of the community have collapsed into the huge pit they call “the hole.� Only a few stubborn souls cling to their homes, refusing to leave. When two workers making their final preparations hear a sound coming from a basement, they break a cellar window and find a terrified man curled up in a corner.

In Ådalen, 700 kilometers away, police officer Eira Sjödin is investigating the disappearance of a man reported missing by his ex-wife. Eira and her colleagues search his apartment, contact his friends and relatives, and query local hospitals, but the man has vanished without a trace.

Eira knows the pain of loss—she mourns for her mother, whose mind has been stolen by dementia. To escape her loneliness and her memories, Eira loses herself in a casual affair. But she’s wholly unprepared when her feelings deepen for GG, who is twenty years her senior–and her boss.

When the diligent GG doesn’t show up for work two days in a row, Eira and her colleagues quickly realize that something is wrong—their boss has gone missing. In the dramatic second installment of the High Coast Series, Eira Sjödin finds herself at the mercy of an elusive perpetrator—and of a love she can no longer deny.

6) The Polar Bear Screen: A Constable Petra Jensen Novella by Christoffer Petersen to be published on the 17th of January 2023. Greenland.

When a sixteen-year-old girl goes missing on the ice in the far north along Greenland’s treacherous and remote east coast, Constable Petra Jensen thinks she is part of a rescue mission, only to discover not all is as it seems.

The Polar Bear Screen is the sixteenth in the Greenland Missing Persons series of novellas and novels set in the harsh, unpredictable Arctic, rich in tradition, myth and culture.

The Polar Bear Screen continues the adventures of Constable Petra ‘Piitalaat� Jensen, ably assisted by interesting characters, together with a few familiar faces making cameo appearances in the series.

The Greenland Missing Persons stories are set prior to The Ice Star and Seven Graves, One Winter.

7) Trouble by Katja Ivar to be published on the 19th of January 2023. Finland.

The third in the Hella Mauzer mystery series. Set in Finland, early summer 1953. Hella Mauzer the first-ever woman Inspector in the Helsinki Homicide Unit has been fired and is now a reluctant private investigator.

Hella has been asked by the police to do a background check on Johannes Heikkinen, a senior member of the Finnish secret services. Heikkinen has a complicated past: a child dead just weeks after birth and a wife who died in the fire that destroyed their house a few years later. Background checks are not exactly the type of job Hella was hoping for, but she accepts it on the condition that she is given access to the files concerning the roadside death of her father in 1942. Colonel Mauzer, his wife and other family members were killed by a truck in a hit and run incident. An accident, file closed, they say. But not for Hella, whose unwelcome investigation leads to some who would prefer to see her stopped dead in her tracks.

8) Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius to be published on the 23rd of January 2023. Sweden.


Louise Erdrich meets Jo Nesbø in this spellbinding Swedish novel that follows a young indigenous woman as she struggles to defend her family’s reindeer herd and culture amidst xenophobia, climate change, and a devious hunter whose targeted kills are considered mere theft in the eyes of the law.

On a winter day north of the Arctic Circle, nine-year-old Elsa—daughter of Sámi reindeer herders—sees a man brutally kill her beloved reindeer calf and threaten her into silence. When her father takes her to report the crime, local police tell them that there is nothing they can do about these “stolen� animals. Killings like these are classified as theft in the reports that continue to pile up, uninvestigated. But reindeer are not just the Sámi’s livelihood, they also hold spiritual significance; attacking a reindeer is an attack on the culture itself.

Ten years later, hatred and threats against the Sámi keep escalating, and more reindeer are tortured and killed in Elsa’s community. Finally, she’s had enough and decides to push back on the apathetic police force. The hunter comes after her this time, leading to a catastrophic final confrontation.

Based on real events, Ann-Helén Laestadius’s award-winning novel Stolen is part coming-of-age story, part love song to a disappearing natural world, and part electrifying countdown to a dramatic resolution—a searing depiction of a forgotten part of Sweden.

9) A Death in Denmark: The First Gabriel Præst Novel by Amulya Malladi to be published on the 23rd of January 2023. Denmark.

For fans of the Netflix series Borgen and WWII history buffs, A Death in Denmark is a page-turning Nordic thriller with a cosmopolitan vibe, introducing Gabriel Præst, an ex-Copenhagen cop (with impeccable fashion sense), Blues musician, and pursuer of truth as he explores Denmark's Nazi-collaborator past and anti-Muslim present in this intelligent and stimulating murder mystery.


Everyone in Denmark knew that Yousef Ahmed, a Muslim refugee from Iraq, brutally murdered the right-wing politician Sanne Melgaard. So, when part-time Blues musician, frustrated home renovator, and full-time private investigator Gabriel Præst agrees to investigate the matter because his ex--the one who got away--asked him, he knew it was a no-win case.

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But as Gabriel starts to ask questions, his face meets with the fists of Russian gangsters, the Danish Prime Minister asks him for a favor, and he starts to realize that something may be rotten in the State of Denmark.

Wondering if Yousef was framed to heighten the local anti-Muslim sentiment, Gabriel follows a trail back in time to World War II when anti-Semitism was raging during the German occupation of Denmark. Fearing such a mindset has resurfaced, Gabriel rolls up the sleeves of his well-cut suit and gets to work. From the cobblestone streets of Copenhagen to the historic strassen of Berlin where the sounds of the steel-toed boots of marching Nazis still linger, Gabriel finds that some very powerful Danes don't want him digging into the case--as the secrets he unearths could shake the foundations of Danish identity.

10) The End of Drum-Time Hanna Pylväinen to be published on the 24th of January 2023, Sami could be Norway, Sweden or Finland.

From Whiting Award-winner Hanna Pylväinen, The End of Drum-Time is a richly atmospheric saga that charts the repercussions of a scandalous nineteenth century love affair between a young Sámi reindeer herder in the Arctic Circle and the daughter of the renegade Lutheran minister whose teachings are upending the Sámi way of life.

It’s 1851 at the edge of the arctic circle, and things are changing quickly. The church outpost that Lars Levi, a fervent Lutheran minister, mans is a rugged, sparsely populated one. But as the zeal of his teachings mounts, so does the attendance at the weekly services he holds. The Sámi reindeer herders he’s been sent to minister to are skeptical of the Christian values—and strict rules—he preaches, but when Biettar, one of the Sami’s most respected herders, has a dramatic religious awakening on the shortest day of the year, more and more of the Sámi people become ready to let their long-held traditions and beliefs give way to new ones. Biettar’s new commitment to Lars and his teachings means that Biettar’s son, Ivvár, is left to tend the family’s reindeer herd alone, an increasingly impossible task.

Meanwhile, Lars’s daughter, Willa, has always been the picture of obedience, until a chance encounter with Ivvár leads to an infatuation that gradually becomes something more. When a catastrophic illness threatens the life of her young brother, everything she’s ever believed is called into question, making her feel reckless—and free—in a way she’s never been before.

Gorgeously written and stunning in scope, The End of Drum-Time is both a powerful immersion into a rich and sometimes forgotten culture and a celebration of a beautiful, ancient way of life. It masterfully weaves together the complex geopolitics and rich tradition of nineteenth-century Scandinavia; brings to life a people caught between an old way of life and the new; and asks how what we believe shapes the course of our lives.

11) Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren to be published on the 31st of January 2023. Sweden.

High Fidelity meets Where'd You Go Bernadette in this Swedish runaway bestseller, a work of pure literary nostalgia for times just past.

Several years after the disappearance of his wife Cecilia, Martin Berg is tumbling into a life crisis. The owner of an ailing Swedish publishing house, he's left wondering what could have been.


Meanwhile, Martin's old and much more remarkable friend, the artist Gustav Becker, is visiting Gothenburg, plastering billboards across the city that feature the eyes of his greatest muse, Cecilia Berg.

Feeling out of place and restless in the city, Martin's daughter Rakel finds a possible clue to her mother's fate and her world begins to unravel.

A family saga of several generations, Collected Works is a story about enduring love, absence, friendship, and art in the intersection of truth and fiction.

12) Talk Show Ghost by Christoffer Petersen to be published on the 31st of January 2023. Greenland.

When a popular talk show host disappears after interviewing Constable David Maratse, Kamiila Sorsuttartoq reaches out to an old friend to find her.

Talk Show Ghost is a short twenty-minute read plucked from Christoffer Petersen’s Guerrilla Greenland series of speculative novellas.

13) Woman, Captain, Rebel: The Extraordinary True Story of a Daring Icelandic Sea Captain by Margaret Willson to be published on the 31st of January 2023. Iceland.

A notorious crime, a lone woman fighting for equality, and the thrills of the wide-open sea

A daring and magnificent account of Iceland's most famous female sea captain who constantly fought for women's rights and equality—and who also solved one of the country's most notorious robberies.

Many people may have heard the old sailing superstition that having women onboard a ship was bad luck. Thus, the sea remains in popular knowledge a male realm. When we think of examples of daring sea captains, swashbuckling pirates, or wise fishermen, many men come to mind. Cultural anthropologist Margaret Willson would like to introduce a fearless woman into our imagination of the sea: Thurídur Einarsdóttir.

Captain Thurídur was a controversial woman constantly contesting social norms while simultaneously becoming a respected captain fighting for dignity and equality for underrepresented Icelanders. Both horrifying and magnificent, this story will captivate readers from the first page and keep them thinking long after they turn the last page.

14) Hunting Lessons: A short story of love and learning in the Arctic by Christoffer Petersen to be published on the 12th of January 2023. Greenland.

Old flames are reignited when a woman from Maratse’s past arrives unannounced in the far north of Greenland, telling strange tales and carrying a child in her belly.

Hunting Lessons is the twenty-fifth in a series of novellas to feature Constable David Maratse in Greenland. Each novella is set during Maratse’s career as a police constable, and features aspects of Greenlandic culture, tradition, and not least the stunning natural environment.

Constable David Maratse also features in the popular Greenland Crime series starting with Seven Graves, One Winter, and makes regular cameo appearances in the Greenland Missing Persons series.

15) "Dust in the Wind" by Stefán Máni to be Published on the 17th of January 2023. Iceland.

The Number One Crime Series from Iceland

Detective H. Grímsson has solved many murder cases and has captured quite a few dangerous criminals and madmen. He is intelligent, hard as nails and very resourceful. But he is also his own worst enemy. After an unfortunate shooting incident in Iceland's largest shopping mall on Christmas Eve, he is demoted to a police deputy in a small rural village in eastern Iceland. Grímsson's plan is to kick back, drink some beer and enjoy this time away from home.

When two young female hitchhikers disappear, Grímsson fears that the girls are lost in the highlands or have drowned in the merciless glacial river. But then one of the girls wanders naked into the village and dies in Grimsson's arms. Grímsson organizes a massive search for the second missing girl. Is one of the villagers responsible for the girls� disappearance? The perpetrator could easily be a member of the rescue team looking for the missing girl.

When Grímsson finds out that foreign girls have disappeared in the area before, he realizes that he might be dealing with a devious serial killer—a real monster who hides behind an innocent and bland façade. Evil is at large.