There are several Swedish novels, which I think should have been made into a movie or a TV series a long time ago.
I don't expect that you know any of them though, so I have decided to only mention some works by the same author, which don't have much or anything to do with Sweden, so they could have been palatable internationally and gotten more recognition and funding.
"Ulrike och kriget" and "Ulrike och freden" by Vibeke Olsson is a series of two books about a teenager in Nazi Germany, who loses exactly everything during the WWII and its aftermath.
Of course, it might be hard for many people to root for Ulrike for one big reason: she's a fanatic Nazi. But it's made clear that it's twelve years of propaganda in schools and Hitler Jugend, that has made her what she is. And if only things had been different, she would have just been a normal teenager going to school, taking care of her three younger brothers, and just helping her mother out with all various things. Actually, she did those things anyway. Because even though she was a faithful Nazi, she was more brainwashed into a disastrous ideologi than completely rotten.
Later on, Vibeke Olsson came to write a third "more mature" novel about Nazi Germany called "Molnfri bombnatt".
Vibeke Olsson has also written many novels about people in the Roman empire. They are kind of different from most other works about this era though, which will often focus on the upper classes of Rome and mostly take place in Italy or (if it is a religious work about Jesus and his disciples) Israel.
The only significant exception to this rule, that people in many countries might be more or less familiar with, is "Asterix" comics, where the Romans are antagonists and the protagonists are Gauls, and almost every story start and end in Gaul (modern-day France). But it seems like Vibeke Olsson did something similar.
It is common that her protagonists are poor slaves, and/or they will live somewhere in the northernmost provinces of the empire, which is modern-day southern Germany and Austria.
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