We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. We pretend we're normal, that we're reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.” That we know how sex works. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. 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. You're supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human being for.īecause there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days. So it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. All it took was one single really bad idea. It was easy to get to this point, much easier than you might think. A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. Here is an exclusive look at the author's upcoming gem.Ī bank robbery. Into the mix step colorful characters who turn out to have much more in common - including all the flaws, heartache and confusion that come with being human - once we can see beyond their sometimes exasperating personalities.Īnd it's all told Backman-style, with a huge helping of humor, sometimes verging on slapstick. The story includes the attempted robbery of a cashless bank (oops) and a real estate showing that turns into a rather farcical hostage situation. Its warmhearted quirkiness is also prominent in Backman's upcoming novel, the aptly titled Anxious People, out on Sept. The unlikely hit features Ove, a misanthropic 59-year-old widower who plans to kill himself but gets repeatedly interrupted by a motley crew of endearingly intrusive neighbors. in 2013 and on best-seller lists for more than three years. Readers adored A Man Called Ove, the utterly charming novel by the Swedish writer Fredrik Backman, published in the U.S.

Linnéa Jonasson Bernholm & Appendix fotografi/AARP

Anxious people fredrik