This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

And this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Kaiser Norman, an investigative journalist whose previous work

has included a consideration of Afrikaners in a bridge over blood river, but his new book is

turning eye to her native Sweden in Sweden's dark soul, the unraveling of a utopia.

Now, for most of us sort of, you know, hand-rigging liberal types, we've tended to be accustomed to looking to Sweden as this kind of wonderful social democratic utopia, where everybody is paid for and everyone pays lots of taxes and you have a wonderful sort of uniform IKEA-style life, and everyone's jumping in and out of saunas, having very wholesome sex with each other.

And Kaiser's book paints an extraordinarily different

picture, one that seems much closer to the sorts of views of Sweden painted actually by Info,

wars and Donald Trump. Cass, can you start by saying what made you write this book, how you got

started on it? So as you mentioned, I've written about South Africa in the past, and after my book, Bridge Over Blood

River came out, disgruntled Afrikaner reached out to me, and he wasn't very happy about

my portrayal of South Africa.

And so he said, you know, Sweden's greatest export is unsolicited advice.

And you should really start taking a look at your own country.

And, I mean, you get feedback from readers all the time,

and not everything kind of sticks with you, but this really did.

And, yeah, I really kept coming back to his comment,

and then one day I stumbled across this crime that had occurred in Sweden.

And it seemed to me that this would be now the perfect way of telling the story of my country and what had happened. And so the crime was

mass sexual assaults of teenage and pre-teenage girls at a music festival in downtown Stockholm.

And it wasn't the crime itself that interested me because

sexual assaults happened, you know, everywhere all the time. But it was the fact that five months

...