The literary career of Kerstin Ekman, widely recognized as one of the most significant novelists of the postwar period, reveals an unusual trajectory and a pronounced capacity for reorientation and renewal. Ekman first garnered attention in the early 1960s as a skilled practitioner of a popular genre, crime fiction. During the 1970s her primary focus shifted to realistic narratives foregrounding working-class women, both in the preindustrial society of the not-so-distant past and in the present. Since the 1980s her novels, several of them set in remote rural locations, have become increasingly complex and demanding while continuing to attract a large readership. Lyricism, elements of fable and fantasy, mythical substructures, and intertextual references are among the formal aspects of her recent work, while thematic emphasis has often been on social and environmental issues as well as timeless existential concerns. Two novels of the 1990s reintroduce a mystery component. Elected...