I should not have gone back to the island but did it all the same. After many years away, Andreas returns to his childhood home on a small island off the Norwegian coast. He is there to sort through the belongings of his late foster father in their decaying old house, the Yellow Villa. But he soon finds himself overwhelmed with unexpected memories, and begins to uncover not only the shadowy history of the island, but the mysterious truth about his family's past ...Rich in shimmering echoes from Shakespeare's play, Steve Sem-Sandberg's The Tempest is a hypnotic portrayal of the inherited guilt that seeps through generations, haunting an island overgrown with myths.

In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the second-largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz. Its chosen leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, is a Jewish businessman and orphanage director -- and the elusive, authoritarian power sustaining the ghetto's very existence. From one of Sweden's most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski's monarchical rule over a quarter-million Jews for the next four years. Driven by a titanic ambition, he sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex and strove to make it -- and himself -- indispensable to the Nazi regime. Drawing on the detailed records of life in the Lodz ghetto, Steve Sem-Sandberg asks the most difficult questions: Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who saved Jewish lives through his collaboration policies?

In the middle of the 20th century Vienna began the transformation from post-imperial oddity to a new sub-imperial status as a satellite of Berlin under Nazi control. Am Spiegelgrund clinic, an institution in a garden suburb of the city, was apparently well-intentioned: both a reform school for lost, wayward boys and girls, and a clinic for chronically ill or malformed children. However, its doctors, nurses and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institution's benign-sounding brief, as instructed by the Nazi regime's euthanasia programme, devised to eliminate 'physically, mentally and racially inferior stock'. Through the eyes of an inmate, Adrian Ziegler, and a nurse, Anna Katschenka, Steve Sem-Sandberg, author of the award-winning The Emperor of Lies, explores an intolerable chapter in Austria's past. An absorbing, overwhelming novel, rich in incident and character, The Chosen Ones is obliquely illuminated by the author's sharp sense of the absurd. Passionately...