"Britt-Marie Was Here" by Fredrik Backman

Over the past twenty years, Scandinavia has been continuously supplying the world market with bestsellers of the so called "Nordic noir" gloomy stories about how in one black and black city a deeply injured police officer is on the trail of a bloodthirsty maniac (part-time victims of family violence in the fifth generation). However, exactly at the moment when the once rich Noire Deposit began to dry up, in Sweden scored a new source — this time the patented Scandinavian optimism, too, however, is not devoid of a certain gloom. One of its pioneers can rightly be considered Fredrik Backman, familiar to the domestic reader from the novels "A Man Called Ove" and "My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry".

His current book is in some sense a continuation or rather a spin — off the second one. 63-year-old Britt-Marie, model housewife, wife of rude Kent, Queen of passive aggression and neighbor of the main character Elsa, this time is in the position of the protagonist — and in a completely unexpected, including for herself, the role of a single woman. Learning that her husband has long and systematically changes, Britt-Marie decides to completely change his life, and to begin with-to leave Kent and for the first time in forty years to find a job. The only thing that she manages to find is the place of the head of the administrative and economic part in the youth center-almost the only still not closed institution choking on unemployment and social problems of the provincial town. From this point on for Britt-Marie will begin a whole new leg, which, as usual, after a certain number of thorns in the form of meeting with "difficult teenagers" and dive into the depths of Amateur football will bring her if not to the stars, then at least to inner freedom, mental independence, and, most importantly, the realization that all the best things in the world (love, trust, gratitude, support) are always given without request just as a gift.

In the retelling of any book, Fredrik Backman looks both sugary-sugary and hopeless-depressive. However, in practice, the writer manages each time to go literally to the very edge and keep from falling into the abyss of sentimentality and falsehood, and from taking off in despair. In short, if the world there are good books that can always touch the soul of the reader a set of the same simple techniques, the book Backman — exactly one of them.