Bringing new light to this story from court documents from the original case, Sem-Sandberg masterfully sustains a rich period atmosphere though poetic and controlled prose even down to the choice of pronouns, as the soldier is held at a cold distance in court proceedings when addressed with the formal, capitalized “You.” Against a landscape devastated by inhumanity and greed and, yet, which manages to sustain hope, W. tells a ruthless, moving, and utterly relevant story of a soldier fighting to make something of the life given to him.

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Steve Sem-Sandberg’s novels include The Emperor of Lies, winner of the August Prize; The Chosen Ones, winner of France’s Prix Médicis étranger; and W., which was awarded the Eyvind Johnson Prize. His books have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into 30 languages. In 2020, he was elected to the Swedish Academy, the body that chooses the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Saskia Vogel is an author and translator from Los Angeles, currently living in Berlin. She was a 2021 PEN Translation Prize finalist and Princeton University’s Fall 2022 Translator in Residence. Her debut novel, Permission, was published in five languages, and she was awarded the 2021 Berlin Senate Grant for Non-German language Literature for her writing.