Contemporary Fiction | Adult

I’m a big fan of Fredrik Backman‘s work, ever since I read A Man Called Ove. He is a prolific Swedish writer, and I’ve enjoyed his subsequent writing, though some more than others. He is a talented writer with a fierce eye for human folly, and he delivers characters brimming with honesty and vulnerability. Here’s a quote from early in this novel, on the challenges of being human in a complicated world: “Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.” Even more remarkable is that this imagery is a translation of the original Swedish, though the collaboration between Backman and Smith is longstanding. That breathtaking observation is why I read his work, though in this one, I enjoyed the second half much more than the first.
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