Few contemporary novelists have made ordinary kindness feel as dramatic as Fredrik Backman does. Born in Sweden on 2 June 1981, he came to fiction sideways, by way of blogging and newspaper columns, and his first novel, A Man Called Ove, arrived in 2012 carrying that same conversational directness. It became a phenomenon at home and then abroad, and it set the pattern for everything that followed.
What distinguishes his work is the refusal to condescend to small places. Beartown, the fictional hockey town at the centre of a trilogy that runs from Beartown through Us Against You to The Winners, is drawn with the moral seriousness usually reserved for capital cities. Anxious People turned a botched bank robbery into a group portrait of people quietly falling apart, and forgave every one of them.
His books have been number one bestsellers in Sweden and have been published in more than twenty-five languages. The voice, wry and unhurried and disarmingly tender, survives the crossing intact.
13 hours and 7 minutes
