Anxious People - Fredrik Backman

[goodreads]

Title: Anxious People
Author: Fredrik Backman
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 360
Date read: January, 2022

Viewing an apartment normally doesn’t turn into a life-or-death situation, but this particular open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes everyone in the apartment hostage. As the pressure mounts, the eight strangers begin slowly opening up to one another and reveal long-hidden truths.

First is Zara, a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else until tragedy changed her life. Now, she’s obsessed with visiting open houses to see how ordinary people live—and, perhaps, to set an old wrong to right. Then there’s Roger and Anna-Lena, an Ikea-addicted retired couple who are on a never-ending hunt for fixer-uppers to hide the fact that they don’t know how to fix their own failing marriage. Julia and Ro are a young lesbian couple and soon-to-be parents who are nervous about their chances for a successful life together since they can’t agree on anything. And there’s Estelle, an eighty-year-old woman who has lived long enough to be unimpressed by a masked bank robber waving a gun in her face. And despite the story she tells them all, Estelle hasn’t really come to the apartment to view it for her daughter, and her husband really isn’t outside parking the car.


As police surround the premises and television channels broadcast the hostage situation live, the tension mounts and even deeper secrets are slowly revealed. Before long, the robber must decide which is the more terrifying prospect: going out to face the police, or staying in the apartment with this group of impossible people.


A hard book to review as the writing style definitely took some getting used to. The first 70 pages took 2.5 months - the last 290 pages took 2.5 days!

Once I got used to the writing style and jumping back and forth in time I did quite enjoy it, and wanted to know what happened next, and how everything would get sorted. It's not as realistic as the other books I've read by Backman (or as I had assumed), but the characters came to life, and - fools or not - I grew to care for many of them.

Not Backman's best (that's still "Britt-Marie Was Here"), but not his worst either.