Tove Alsterdal's Books

Biography

Childhood

Tove Alstedal was born in Malmö in 1960 but grew up in Umeå, some 700 miles further north. Alstedal describes her parents as “class travellers”, and the family was socially and politically active.

Her mother grew up in Tornedalen on the Finnish / Swedish border, a gateway between the East and West. As a teenager at the start of the Second World War, she worked as an interpreter for refugees who had fled across the Torne, the river that separates Finland from Sweden. She became a sociologist and started Sweden’s first women’s shelter, becoming chairman of the National Organisation for Women’s Shelters.

Her father started work as a caretaker but became a journalist, author, diplomat and translator. His works included, amongst others, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism: The Example of Poland.

As you can imagine, politics was always a hot topic at the kitchen table and at parties. Alsterdal’s cousin Sven-Erik Bucht became the Swedish Minister of Rural Affairs.

Early career

Alsterdal’s first job was as a psychiatric nurse though she soon moved on to study journalism at Kalix Folkhögskola in the north of Sweden.

From there, she worked as a freelance journalist and, in the 1990s, wrote manuscripts for theatre, radio, TV and film. For a while, she even ran a cabaret theatre with her ex-husband.

Like Anders Roslund, she became frustrated with working for the television.

“I worked with TV news, where you may have a minute and a half to explain an event. Reality is seldom so simple, and I longed to go deeper.” (Göteborgs-Posten)

Crime Fiction

That depth came from writing novels. Tove Alsterdal has become a publishing sensation in her Swedish homeland, though she is little known in the UK. Like the work of Martin Cruz Smith, Tove Alsterdal’s books take on big socio-political issues and overlay them with the personal experiences and perspectives of the people who are caught up in them.

“I have always been involved in societal issues. Of course, it is possible to see the current detective story writers as today’s working-class writers, who describe the reality of people’s everyday lives.” (Kulturbloggen)

Stand Alone Novels

In 2009 Alsterdal made her crime fiction debut with The Forgotten Dead. It chronicles the migration of workers from Africa to Europe and the slave traders that exploit them. The novel begins with the discovery of a dead black man on a beach in Tarifa on the far southern tip of Spain.

 ”In crime novels, there is usually a great uproar when you find a corpse, but in reality, dead bodies float ashore quite often on beaches in southern Europe, where the rest of us go on holiday.”  (Deckarhuset)

Alsterdal went on to write a further four stand-alone novels. They have been translated into almost thirty languages, but unfortunately, not English.

I tystnaden begravd (Buried in Silence) follows the trail of the Swedes who emigrated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. They dreamt of a better future, only to meet the realities of Stalin’s Russia. (Some of Alsterdal’s relatives disappeared in the migration). The book was nominated as the best crime novel of the year in Sweden, the Netherlands and France.

Låt mig ta din hand (The Disappeared) won the Swedish Crime Writers Academy Award in 2014. A woman plunges to her death from the eleventh story of a building. Her sister discovers she had recently visited Argentina, where their mother disappeared in the 1970s. She had possibly been a victim of one of the Argentine military junta’s purges.

The rest of Tove Alsterdal’s books continue on a similar theme. In one, Alsterdal explores the plight of Romanian Gypsies living on landfill sites. In another, a child’s body is discovered in the Sudetenland, where the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia.

Alsterdal has gone to considerable lengths to research her books. She has lied to Russian Security Police, toured old torture centres in Argentina and visited the Roma families living in Romania’s landfills.

“There is nothing that inspires me as much as reality; it is never what you think it is.” (Lässa & Lyssna)

These first five novels stand almost but not entirely alone.

“I write completely independent books, but it’s fun to let the characters wander a bit between them; they appear in minor supporting roles so that anybody who has read a previous book knows a little more. If you haven’t read it, you won’t notice it, but those who have, get a small bonus.” (Lässa & Lyssna)

The High Coast

Alsterdal’s sixth novel, We Know You Remember (Rotvälta), is set on The High Coast or Höga Kusten. It is a remote area of Sweden that UNESCO has recognised as a world heritage site because of its exceptional geology. Alsterdal spends her time there during the summer months.

“The beauty of the landscape with the blue mountains, the rushing river and the incredible light is the closest we can get to Norway and its fjords.” (Aftonbladet)

Though a rural area, it has an industrial past and is littered with traces of the timber and pulp industry that thrived there. In 1931, there was an industrial uprising that the government quashed with troops. During the fighting, five people died, including Eira Söderberg, a 20-year-old bystander hit by a ricocheting bullet. The incident changed Sweden’s policing policy; it also gave Alsterdal the name of the main character in her sixth novel, Officer Eira Sjödin.

We Know You Remember won the prestigious glass key award from the Scandinavian Crime Writers Society. It has, fortunately, been translated into English. Officer Eira Sjödin confronts a cold case in small-town northern Sweden, a murder she remembers from her youth.

You Will Never be Found (Slukhål) will be available in English next year (2023). It breaks Alsterdal’s pattern of stand-alone novels and picks up on the career of Eira Sjödin.

Liza Marklund

One of Alsterdal’s long-term friendships is with the novelist Liza Marklund. She is another bestselling crime author, and they met at journalism school.

We joined the journalism line 30 years ago and have been friends and read each other’s first drafts. (Lässa & Lyssna)

As well as her own books, Tove Alsterdal has edited Marklund’s Annika Bengtzon series, and they both critique each other’s work.

“There is talk of the incredible loneliness of being an author. The collaboration with Liza has made me much less alone.” (Lässa & Lyssna)