I like the sound of Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village (Allen Lane, £20), which has become a bestseller in Sweden. It’s a book in which Marit Kapla, editor of a cultural magazine in Gothenburg, returns to her home place and asks its 40 inhabitants to talk about their past and present. Reviewing it yesterday in The Observer, Nicci Gerrard said that “the voices that have come from this ordinary little village have become like an existential meditation on what it is to be alive, to be human, creatures living in time while the river runs on and wolves howl in the woods… Kapla has made her undramatic little patch of Earth into a microcosm of life. Its specificity allows it to be universal.”