Kurdo Baksi met Stieg Larsson in 1992, more than a decade before The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made Larsson posthumously famous, and knew him primarily as a journalist, activist and obsessive opponent of racism and the far right.

This short memoir follows their friendship and working relationship through the creation of the anti-racist magazine Expo, years of political organising, death threats, sleeplessness and arguments over how seriously Sweden was taking its growing extremist movements.

I was surprised by this, because it was a beautiful reminder that people have political lives before enormous commercial mythology emerges, and then flattens. Larsson here is committed, difficult, funny, dogmatic and chronically overworked; someone for whom journalism was a form of democratic combat. The passages on Expo are particularly strong, showing the magazine emerging not as an accessory to Larsson’s later fiction but as one of the central projects of his life. 

MacLehose Press / Quercus, London, 2010. First British edition, first printing. Trade paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with minor edge and corner wear; internally clean and binding firm. Very good condition.