This strange, beguiling book...gives closure to a substantial career without becoming maudlin or overly bleak. The waters around Welin’s island may freeze in the winter, but there is human warmth to be found in these pages, along with glimmers of hope and consolation... The bell may have tolled for one of Scandinavia’s finest writers, but his connection to those left behind is unbroken.

A powerful reminder that [Mankell] was also a literary writer of considerable accomplishment... After the Fire is a life-enhancing novel... a suitable final curtain for a much-missed modern novelist

It is very moving and rather beautiful

The novel’s atmosphere is bleak and elegiac, suggesting that Mankell wrote it with his own impending death in mind

After the Fire is full of regret, loneliness and the melancholy of growing old, but there is also hope and love.

This posthumous translation by Marlaine Delargy, captivating in its delicately wry tone, echoes the seemingly flat reportage of Mankell’s prose: it somehow grabs you and won’t let you go… Mankell’s last novel is an elegiac meditation on old age and impending death… The extraordinary gift of Mankell’s bleak narrative is to make the last months of the life of his depressed and, frankly, unsympathetic and solitary anti-hero, both comforting and even inspiring. It is Mankell’s own candle in the lightless void

The huge number of readers who are devoted to the work of the late Henning Mankell will find in this, his last novel, all the characteristics they value: the observant descriptions of the minutiae of daily life, the gentle melancholy, the careful analysis of relationships (especially between fathers and daughters) and, above all, the inevitability of loneliness and loss

This profoundly gloomy yet ultimately hopeful novel – the last from the late grand master of Scandinavian noir – revolves around discovering who could have been responsible for this senseless crime

This final novel from Mankell (the Kurt Wallander series), posthumously published in a stunning English translation, questions what happens to a person who has lost everything—and who considers himself too old to rebuild... It’s a skillfully told, exquisitely structured story filled with sharp insights into human nature and unflinching examinations of the complex relationships to which people bind themselves in order to feel a little bit less alone.

A bracing look at a twilight year in the life of an old man who, when confronted daily by perfectly good reasons for giving up altogether, doesn’t so much rise above as plow stoically through them.

Lovely… Elegiac and steeped in the emptiness of the Swedish landscape

Elegiac and melancholic.

Excellent book - Great characters and plot. I would highly recommend this book.

Good, fast paced and well written.

Absolutely brilliantly written, characters are well-drawn and believable and I cannot recommend it enough.

This book completely gripped me from the very start. I love books that make me think. I also love finding out about what makes people do the things that they do. So for me I was hooked from the very first line of the synopsis. What makes a woman fall in love with a death row inmate? What makes them believe that they are innocent? And what makes someone do that bad things they do which result in them ending up on death row? This is a really good fast passed psychology thriller. Which I raced through to find out what actually happened on that brutal night.

The Innocent Wife is a brilliant read. I was hooked from the start and read in within a couple of days. I loved how much depth there was to each character making you are the reader feel you really knew them. I cannot wait to read more from Amy Lloyd, I believe she will be an author to watch.

Ever since I learned about women who write to, fall in love with and marry men on Death Row, I've been fascinated by this phenomenon, so this book was a must-read. Lloyd keeps the first three-quarters or so beautifully on track as Samantha obsesses about a handsome killer, gets involved in the campaign to free him and marries him, despite him being effectively a stranger. Alongside this main story is a sub-strand which calls into question Samantha's own past behaviour and quite how balanced she herself is. This keeps the tension high and I changed my mind a couple of times as to where I thought the book was going, and ended up staying up late to find out whether I was right (sort of!)

The Innocent Wife was a brilliantly immersive read - if you watched Making A Murderer you'll probably like this - taking that type of premise as a starting point then taking the reader on a kind of ‘behind the scenes’ journey - focusing on Sam, obsessed with the subject to the point that she drops everything, moves to the States and ultimately marries him. Then, however, the campaign is successful and she's faced with living with a man she barely knows and who may not be as innocent as he seems. Through her we meet the television crew, the people from the hometown of the dead girl, various other involved parties and start to slowly uncover the genuine truth of the matter. What I loved about it was the way the author obfuscates her characters, making it hard to see realities but done in a very realistic manner.Dennis is a mass of contradictions, one moment you are full of sympathy for his plight, others you think "ooh this guy is dangerous" but until you reach the final pages you are never quite sure. Overall a really great, gripping, page turner of a read. You just want to know - I also thought the ending was cleverly thought provoking. Recommended.

Deeply unsettling

Exquisitely subtle

What a gripping, chilling book!

A grim and unbearably tense debut chiller with an unexpected and utterly fitting finale.

A compulsively readable thriller.

I’m gripped

Fans of Gone Girl, Serial and Making a Murderer will not be able to put this book down. I promise you all that!

A must read