The Sounding Human + The Mafia Pact + Free + Swede

The Sounding Human: How did humans learn to navigate the sea? Was Magellan truly the first circumnavigator? How did the sperm whale contribute to the Enlightenment? In what way did the Scottish baker Robert Dick change our view of the history of life? How do we actually know how deep the sea is? Following the debut with "The Gospel of the Eels", Patrik Svensson has written a book about the people who explored, mapped, tried to understand, and subdue the sea. "The Sounding Human" is about the allure of the sea, about that ancient drive that has always led people to seek out the open ocean. It is a book, in short, about curiosity.

The Mafia Pact: A journalistic investigation into how organized crime is eating deeper and deeper into the trust-based Swedish society. In "The Mafia Pact", crime reporter Lasse Wierup provides a picture that is as initiated as it is frightening of how more and more criminal networks target companies and authorities in pursuit of easy money. In the next stage, lawyers, doctors, accountants, business leaders, and bank officials become involved. The black economy is, on several levels, merging with the white. We have learned to live with bombings, shootings, and innocent victims. Will Sweden succeed in defending the welfare state and trust—or will we lose what made the country unique?

Free: Lea grows up in Stalinist Albania. It is an existence marked by isolation, surveillance, and hardship. But Lea suspects none of this. She is proud of her free and equal country, entirely unaware of the price her family has paid to survive. In 1990, everything changes. The regime falls, but the newly won freedom soon shows another face, also brutal and ruthless. Free – A Child and a Country at the End of History is an overwhelming and sharp narrative about growing up during the transition between communism and capitalism.

Swede: Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. The water lies flat as a mirror against the red morning sky. It's nearly seven o'clock. The naval base at Pearl Harbor slowly wakes up. Suddenly, a familiar noise is heard. But something is wrong. He hears machine guns. And screams. Then he understands. This is the story of a young sailor who experienced all the great battles against Japan in the Pacific during World War II. He saw aircraft carriers sink and marines storm beaches. He saw attacking bombers in the sky and submarine torpedoes approaching. He saw bloated and burned bodies floating in the sea. He saw his comrades die. Daily life on a warship is often slow, an eternal wait for new orders, but in an instant, you find yourself in the middle of the war, and the 150 men on the destroyer Monaghan are tested to the limit. Many died in the fighting. A few survived. One of them is the Swedish-American Emery "Swede" Lundquist, and he is still alive. His family emigrated from Roslagen in the early 20th century, in the shadow of World War I. After a difficult upbringing in an orphanage, among other places, he joined the US Navy. Many books have been written and films made about World War II, but few can tell what it was like to be there on the spot. Swede is one of them. This is his story.