PAULINE RICCIUS is a Swedish author who has spent more than twenty years working in publishing, presently as the Marketing and Sales Director of Harper Collins Nordic, following a degree in Economics and studies in Literature, English and French. Her previous novels include her debut THE TWIN SISTERS (2021) and most recently THE SUN WIND (2022) – a novel about daring to break with one's past and finding home when feeling most lost.

Pauline grew up in Gothenburg, and after studying at Lund University, she briefly lived in Paris but then settled in Stockholm where she still lives together with her husband, two daughters, twin sons and a dog.

Many of her novels are set in locations that hold a special meaning for her. She often goes to write in her family’s holiday home in a fishing village on the west coast of Sweden, where her childhood summers were spent. She has devoted much time traveling to Thailand, doing research and exploring the various settings that appear in her debut novel.

Pauline’s new historical fiction series will be published by Bazar Förlag.

Agent Maja Hjelm

TO BE PUBLISHED JANUARY 2026, BAZAR FÖRLAG
GENRE HISTORICAL FICTION
PAGES 350

ALL RIGHTS AVAILABLE

Northern Sweden in the early 1940s. When a young woman is sent to a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, she is torn away from her life, her love – and her future.

There, in the middle of a desolate forest and bitter cold, an unexpected friendship develops. Another young woman also arrives at the sanatorium. Behind her seemingly sheltered life as a doctor's daughter, something else is hidden. A restless longing. The Second World War rages in the background, but soon it creeps closer and closer, and despite the fact that the two women come from completely different backgrounds, they find comfort in each other's company.

TWELVE BREATHS TO THE LAKE is the first part of a trilogy set in the shadow of war, illness and suppressed dreams, but it is also a story filled with joie de vivre and human relationships. The novel is inspired by the author's own grandmother's experiences at a sanatorium in Sandträsk in northern Sweden.