My Brother

Jana Kippo returns to the small northern Swedish town where she grew up. Her twin brother still lives there. So do the memories she has spent decades trying to bury. My Brother (originally Jag for ner till bror) is a debut novel that hit Swedish literature like a fist.

Why Start Here

This is the book that made Smirnoff’s name. Nominated for the August Prize in 2018, it announced a writer who refuses to look away from the worst parts of family life. The prose is clipped and raw, full of physical detail: cold air, bruised skin, the silence between people who share too much history. It reads fast but stays with you.

Starting here gives you Smirnoff at her most concentrated. The Jana Kippo trilogy that follows, with Vi for upp med mor (2019) and Sen for jag hem (2020), builds on this foundation, but the first book works as a standalone experience. You do not need the sequels to feel its impact.

What to Expect

A story told in fragments and flashbacks, moving between Jana’s adult return and her childhood in the same unforgiving landscape. The violence is never sensationalized but never softened either. Northern Sweden is not a backdrop here. It is a character: vast, indifferent, beautiful in ways that make the human cruelty feel even starker.