A Man Called Ove
He is impossible. He is also the most loveable character you will read this year. Backman hides a very large heart inside a very small man.
The Neighbourhood Curmudgeon
Fredrik Backman's 2012 novel follows Ove, a 59-year-old Swedish man of rigid rules and spectacular grumpiness who has recently lost both his job and his wife Sonja, the only person who made sense of him. He begins methodically planning to die and is methodically interrupted by a pregnant Iranian woman who reverses a trailer into his garden wall. And then by a stray cat. And then by the rest of the neighbourhood. The novel spent years on Swedish bestseller lists and became an international phenomenon in translation. The 2015 Swedish film was nominated for two Academy Awards.
Reading A Man Called Ove
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"He was, in many ways, a man of strict principles. He drove a Saab.
"Fredrik Backman · A Man Called Ove
Backman originally wrote Ove as a character in a blog post about a grumpy neighbour. Reader response was so enthusiastic that he expanded it into a novel, his debut, writing the whole thing in a year.
The Swedish film version in 2015 became Sweden's most successful film in decades. The American remake A Man Called Otto starring Tom Hanks was released in 2022 and was also a major commercial success.