Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

In April Sofi Oksanen’s best-selling novel Puhdistus, Purge (winner of the Finlandia Prize for Fiction in 2008, WSOY, and now available in English translation) was top of the best-selling Finnish fiction list again. Quite an achievement.

Finns seem to be besotted with Pertti Jarla’s comic books: three of them, set in the weird city of Fingerpori (‘Fingerborg’, Arktinen Banaani), were on the list.

The final volume of artist and writer Hannu Väisänen’s fictionalised autobiography, Kuperat ja koverat (‘Convex and concave’, Otava, 2009), was number five on the list. Number three was a newcomer, Tumman veden päällä (‘On dark water’, Tammi), also an autobiographical novel about childhood, by the the actor Peter Franzén.

Names appearing high on the foreign fiction list in April included Child Lee, Dan Brown, Falcones Ildefonso, Liza Marklund, Pamuk Orhan and W.G. Sebald.