Evil

First in audio! One of the most famous Swedish novels, now a modern classic—an account of how one boy set out to fight evil. He didn’t have a magic wand, but he was pretty good at self-defense techniques.

“Evil” by Ян Гійу is an incredibly dynamic, tense, and frightening book that tries to answer the eternal question: can real evil be defeated using only intelligence and intellect, without resorting to violence?

Fifteen-year-old Erik lives with a sadistic father and a frightened mother. He’s used to daily beatings and harassment, yet at school he’s also not above using fists. Everything changes overnight when Erik is expelled from school. His last option is a closed boarding school, where the administration sometimes turns a blind eye to the students’ not-so exemplary behavior.

In this isolated world, narrow and claustrophobic, Erik gradually realizes that fascism is alive and well here; tormenting the weak is the norm; and the only way to keep your life and your sanity is to join the pack—or, again, with your fists. But Erik genuinely wants to change. So he and his friend Pierre—whose name is no accident, as are the references to “War and Peace”—try not to resist evil with violence.

However, evil is always stronger, and soon Erik has to start a real war against it…

Jan Guillou is a Swedish writer and journalist, author of many historical, adventure, and spy novels. In his best-known book, he masterfully combines eternal themes of classic Russian novels (What is evil? Does evil have a soul? What is evil afraid of?) with a tense, quest-like plot—one that’s very hard to put down.