Anxious People
Fredrick Backman
A book about which People magazine said:
“[A] quirky, big-hearted novel…Wry, wise, and often laugh-out-loud funny, it’s a wholly original story that delivers pure pleasure.” It scored 4.4 out of 5 on Amazon and the blurb promised humour.
I read this on Kindle and I’m glad that I did as much of it was written as police interview transcripts. Sometimes a format such as that is a bit difficult to follow in audio book format. It was strangely written, talking about the characters from different perspectives by a narrator that leads us up many blind alleys but gradually takes us through a story of a failed bank robbery and an apartment viewing on New Year’s Eve.
The style of writing is different to what we are used to, but it’s completely worth sticking with it. It switches from second person to third person omniscient and then there are sections where we’re reading the transcript of the police interview. Very different to usual. However, the story is like an onion and the narrator peels off layers, revealing the back story of each character, slowly and surely, intertwining them into each others’ lives. It had such wonderfully insightful descriptions: I highlighted so many paragraphs from this book as there were sections that touched me and made me laugh and many others that chimed a bell in me and made me swallow back a lump in my throat.
About parenting:
“Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized (sic) that we don’t actually know what we’re doing. So the man did what we all do: he pretended he knew.”
“‘She said I’m overprotective. That I’m one of those penguins that squats on top of a stone because I don’t want to accept that the egg has gone. She said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.’”
And this struck a chord for me because we have nicknames for everyone in our family:
“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.” It’s so true. The nicknames in our family have evolved over our lifetime, with most being attached to a family joke that nobody else could ever find funny, let alone understand.
When I read this, I laughed out loud because it’s the sort of thing someone I know very well would say: ‘I’ve never had an affair. But once I changed hairdressers, and I didn’t dare walk past the old one for several years.’
I could keep pasting sections of the book in here, but you’d be better reading the book yourself and laughing and crying at this gloriously joyous and heartwarming story for yourself.
I was looking forward to reading a funny book, but this book, written by the author of A Man Called Ove, was a beautifully written story about meeting strangers and turning them into friends, and looking at your family in a slightly different way, finding inner depths to the people you think you know inside out, but have long since only been taking at face value.
I couldn’t recommend this book highly enough, but I’ve heard a whisper that I may not hear the same from my Between the Covers friends. I found it joyful and full of deep insight into how we see ourselves and how others can easily misconceive our actions.
After the meeting, beautifully hosted by Josie as always, I realise that this book is Marmite. A lot of books have hit the middle ground with us all and we can fail to recall them, even collectively, weeks later. This one was an absolute hit or an absolute hate, but not forgettable. Our average score out of 10 for Anxious People was 7/10 which doesn’t adequately reflect the low scores or the high!
Read it and make up your own mind! 📚
List of Suspicious Things
Jennie Godfrey
This book is set between 1979 and 1981, so just when I was starting to see outside my own little world and I can remember a lot about that time. The people of Yorkshire and especially the towns where bodies were found must have been terrified as the serial murderer known as the Yorkshire Ripper started his rampage, killing thirteen women and injuring many others, before being arrested at the beginning of 1981.
The story is about two children, best friends, Miv and Sharon, living close to the Ripper’s areas, during the time it was all happening. It’s told in the first person, with Miv telling us the story of her life with a clinically depressed and reclusive mother, her father who barely had time to notice her and her main caregiver, her aunt, who seemed to be there grudgingly and letting Miv know it. Despite this, Miv seemed to want to retain this miserable status quo, and all because of Sharon. When she thought her father wanted to move them away from the Ripper’s hunting ground, Miv came up with a plan to become an amateur sleuth and track down the Ripper, which would stop them having to move. Every great detective needs a sidekick, and Sharon was roped in to the role.
Things didn’t go to plan, as these things are wont to do, and her list of suspects grew longer. In the process of investigating, the girls met new people, came up against discrimination of all types but also they found the best part of people’s characters. The girls, with their ill-advised meddling, drew many people together that would never have otherwise met.
At first, I was prepared to hate it: I am usually against stories authors write about true catastrophes that they monetise for their own gain if they weren’t there and didn’t experience it for themselves. However, there is an argument that if we don’t hear about these things, how can we learn from them? Do we need to learn from fiction? Is the information reliable? Anyway, this book could really have been written about any fictional serial killer and the premise would have worked. What I liked is it was set in an era I know and remember. Did it need to be about Peter Sutcliffe? Not sure.
The main storyline is centred around the unwise decisions Miv makes and drags Sharon into, and the choices her and her growing group of friends make along the way. The author draws their characters beautifully and the plot line moves swiftly, bringing us all along with them in their harebrained schemes.
It is touching, funny and terribly sad, beautifully written, with the right amounts of jeopardy and devastation to keep us invested. Ultimately, it was a book about love and friendship, family and friends, a voyage of discovery into the people they knew and those they would never normally have met.
There can be no happy ending as there real people were killed as well as fictitious calamities, however, I loved this book and would happily read another of Jennie Godfrey’s novels.
I’m glad I read this and didn’t listen to it: I’m becoming a Kindle convert, although having limited time, I read in very small chunks which can make books a bit disjointed.
The Between the Covers ladies scored it a 9/10 across the board so one of our most successful books so far.
Our next book is Tom Lake by Anne Pratchett. Read along and let us know what you think!
Thank you to Josie for hosting - a wonderful job!
Sarah xx
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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