Series: / standalone
Pages: 341
Genre: Fiction
A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined
Looking at real estate isn't usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can't fix up their own marriage. There's a wealthy banker who has been too busy making money to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can't seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment's only bathroom, and you've got the worst group of hostages in the world.
Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in a motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.
Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.
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❝They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.❞
I can't hide it anymore - I am officially a huge Backman fan! His writing is absolutely magnificent and he has a great talent for story-telling.
I've previously read two of his works - A Man called Ove and Beartown and I absolutely loved how realistically he portrayed all of the characters and the story in those two books and the way he wrote about problems and about things that aren't always easy to talk about. I expected something similar to that in this book, but I got something entirely else.
Anxious People is a story that starts quite unrealistically with very unrealistic (even absurd) characters. For the first half of the book, I didn't know where the story will take me and what I'll get out of it. I have to say I didn't really know what the message was and just couldn't really get into it, but the last half of the book, the story slowly started coming together and I connected all of the dots and had this 'oh!' moment.
I loved how Backman portrayed different problems from different people. How different people were thrown together in an unexpected and sudden way that no one could ever anticipate. We could say this story was really silly and funny, but it also dealt with modern problems and people who came out as silly and as rude idiots, but deep inside, they were all battling different battles no one really knew about.
This book was such a great and unexpected surprise because I really didn't know what to expect when I started reading it. But this is the thing with Backman - you can hardly predict how his books will play out. You always have to expect the unexpected and then some more.
Yet another book I can joyfully recommend!
Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (soon to be a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks), My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, as well as two novellas, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime. Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, his first work of non-fiction, will be released in the US in May 2019. His books are published in more than forty countries. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Twitter @BackmanLand or on Instagram @backmansk.
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