PUBLICATION DATE: 29 JANUARY 2026 PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £ 9. 99 | ORENDA BOOKS
The year is 2082. Climate collapse, famine and war have left the world in ruins. In the shadow of the Alpha-Omega regime – descendants of the super-rich architects of disaster – sixteen year-old Boo Ashworth and her uncle risk everything to save what’s left of human knowledge, hiding the last surviving books in a secret library beneath the streets of Hobart.
But Boo has a secret of her own: an astonishing ability to memorise entire texts with perfect recall. When the library is discovered and destroyed, she’s forced to flee – armed with nothing but the stories she carries in her mind, and a growing understanding of her family’s true past.
Hunted and alone, and with the help of some unlikely allies, she must fight to save her loved ones – and bring hope to a broken world.
PUBLICATION DATE: 10th APRIL 2025 PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £ 9. 99 | ORENDA BOOKS
LIVING FOREVER CAN BE LETHAL…
Ruth is a law-abiding elder, working out her national service, but she has secrets. Her tireless research into the disease that killed her young daughter had an unexpected outcome: the discovery of a vaccine against old age. Just one jab a year reverses your biological clock, guaranteeing a long, healthy life.
But Ruth’s cure was hijacked by her colleague, Erik Grundleger, who hungers for immortality, and the SuperJuve – a premium upgrade – was created, driving human lifespan to a new high. The wealthy elite who take it are dubbed Supers, and the population begins to skyrocket.
Then, a perilous side-effect of the SuperJuve emerges, with catastrophic consequences, and as the planet is threatened, the population rebels, and laws are passed to restore order: life ends at 120. Supers are tracked down by Omnicide investigators like Mara … and executed…
Mara has her own reasons for hunting Supers, and she forms an unlikely alliance with Ruth to find Grundleger. But Grundleger has been working on something even more radical and is one step ahead, with a deadly surprise in store for them both…
PUBLICATION DATE: 13th MARCH 2025 HARDBACK ORIGINAL | £ 16. 99 | ORENDA BOOKS
Description
Expert on body language and memory, and consultant to the Oslo Police, psychologist Kari Voss sleepwalks through her days, and, by night, continues the devastating search for her young son, who disappeared on his birthday, seven years earlier.
Still grieving for her dead husband, and trying to pull together the pieces of her life, she is thrust into a shocking local investigation, when two teenage girls are violently murdered in a family summer home in the nearby village of Son.
When a friend of the victims is charged with the barbaric killings, it seems the case is closed, but Kari is not convinced. Using her skills and working on instinct, she conducts her own enquiries, leading her to multiple suspects, including people who knew the dead girls well…
With the help of Chief Constable Ramona Norum, she discovers that no one – including the victims – are what they seem. And that there is a dark secret at the heart of Son village that could have implications not just for her own son’s disappearance, but Kari’s own life, too…
I reviewed this book when it was first published last year. The paperback was recently published so I’m sharing the details and my review as part of the tour to celebrate the paperback publication.
Since the hardback was published last year the following has happened:
WINNER of the Cultura’s Best Fiction Book of 2023 (France’s biggest book chain), plus Crime Fiction
Book of the Year at seven different festivals
High-spec signed paperback with foil and embossing
NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER in France with seven hardback reprints and counting…
Johana has been shortlisted for the CWA Crime in Translation Dagger
FIRST in a new series set in Sweden – The Lidingö Mysteries
Book details
Publication Date: 7 November 2024
Format: Paperback
Price: £ 9. 99
Publisher: Orenda Books
Description
Art expert Emma Lindahl is anxious when she’s asked to appraise the antiques and artefacts in the infamous manor house of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families, on the island of Storholmen, where a young woman was murdered nine years earlier, her killer never found.
Emma must work alone, and with the Gussman family apparently avoiding her, she sees virtually no one in the house. Do they have something to hide?
As she goes about her painstaking work and one shocking discovery yields clues that lead to another, Emma becomes determined to uncover the secrets of the house and its occupants.
When the lifeless body of another young woman is found in the icy waters surrounding the island, Detective Karl Rosén arrives to investigate, and memories of his failure to solve the first case come rushing back. Could this young woman’s tragic death somehow hold the key?
Battling her own demons, Emma joins forces with Karl to embark upon a chilling investigation, plunging them into horrifying secrets from the past – Viking rites and tainted love – and Scandinavia’s deepest, darkest winter…
Born in Marseille, France, and with a degree in Political Science, Johana Gustawsson has worked as a journalist for the French and Spanish press, and television. Her critically acclaimed Roy & Castells series, including Block 46, Keeper and Blood Song, won the Plume d’Argent, Balai de la découverte, Balai d’Or and Prix Marseillais du Polar awards, and is now published in 23 countries. A TV adaptation is currently under way in a French, Swedish and UK co-production. The Bleeding was a number-one bestseller in France, receiving critical acclaim across the globe, and Yule Island has won multiple awards, including Book of the Year with France’s biggest retailer, Cultura, and has been optioned for the screen.
Johana lives in Sweden with her Swedish husband and their three sons.
PUBLICATION DATE: 18TH JULY 2024 HARDBACK ORIGINAL | £ 20.00 | OPEN BORDERS PRESS
Blurb
Ten years on from the annexation of Crimea, two years on from Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian people continue to fight back. In the second volume of his war diaries, Andrey Kurkov gives a fresh perspective on a people for whom resistance and solidarity have become a matter of survival.
Our Daily War is a chronological record of the heterogeneous mix that comprises Ukrainian life and thought in the teeth of Russian aggression, from the constant stress of air raids, the deportation of citizens from the occupied regions and the whispers of governmental corruption to Christmas celebrations, crowdfunding and the recipe for a “trench candle”.
Kurkov’s human’s-eye view on the war in Ukraine is by turn bitingly satirical, tragic, humorous and heartfelt. It is also, in the manner of Pepys, an invaluable insight into the history, politics and culture of Ukraine.
Our Daily War is the ideal primer for anyone who would like to know what life is like in that country today.
Art expert Emma Lindahl is anxious when she’s asked to appraise the antiques and artefacts in the infamous manor house of one of Sweden’s wealthiest families, on the island of Storholmen, where a young woman was murdered nine years earlier, her killer never found.
Emma must work alone, and with the Gussman family apparently avoiding her, she sees virtually no one in the house. Do they have something to hide? As she goes about her painstaking work and one shocking discovery yields clues that lead to another, Emma becomes determined to uncover the secrets of the house and its occupants.
When the lifeless body of another young woman is found in the icy waters surrounding the island, Detective Karl Rosén arrives to investigate, and memories of his failure to solve the first case come rushing back. Could this young woman’s tragic death somehow hold the key? Battling her own demons, Emma joins forces with Karl to embark upon a chilling investigation, plunging them into horrifying secrets from the past – Viking rites and tainted love – and Scandinavia’s deepest, darkest winter…
PUBLICATION DATE: 11 MAY 2023 HARDBACK ORIGINAL | £16.99 | ORENDA BOOKS
Blurb
A snobbish Danish literary author is challenged to write a crime novel in thirty days, travelling to a small village in Iceland for inspiration, and then the first body appears…
Copenhagen author Hannah is the darling of the literary community and her novels have achieved massive critical acclaim. But nobody actually reads them, and frustrated by writer’s block, Hannah has the feeling that she’s doing something wrong.
When she expresses her contempt for genre fiction, Hanna is publicly challenged to write a crime novel in thirty days. Scared that she will lose face, she accepts, and her editor sends her to Húsafjörður – a quiet, tight-knit village in Iceland, filled with colourful local characters – for inspiration.
But two days after her arrival, the body of a fisherman’s young son is pulled from the water … and what begins as a search for plot material quickly turns into a messy and dangerous investigation that threatens to uncover secrets that put everything at risk … including Hannah.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 