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![Anxious People: The No. 1 New York Times bestseller, now a Netflix TV Series by [Fredrik Backman]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/517gXBPjUIL._SY346_.jpg)
Anxious People: The No. 1 New York Times bestseller, now a Netflix TV Series Kindle Edition
Fredrik Backman (Author) See search results for this author |
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The funny, touching and unpredictable No. 1 New York Times bestseller, now a major Netflix TV series
'A brilliant and comforting read' MATT HAIG
'Funny, compassionate and wise. An absolute joy' A.J. PEARCE
'A surefooted insight into the absurdity, beauty and ache of life' GUARDIAN
'I laughed, I sobbed, I recommended it to literally everyone I know' BUZZFEED
'Captures the messy essence of being human' WASHINGTON POST
From the 15 million copy internationally bestselling author of A Man Called Ove
_______
It's New Year's Eve and House Tricks estate agents are hosting an open viewing in an up-market apartment when an incompetent bank robber rushes in and politely takes everyone hostage.
For Anna-Lena and Roger, busy buying-up apartments to fill the hole in their marriage, it's something else to talk about.
For Julia and Ro, panicky parents-to-be, it's yet another worry.
Lonely bank manager Zara only came here for the view.
While 87-year-old grandmother Estelle seems rather pleased by the company . . .
As the police gather outside, the anxious strangers huddled within try to make the best of a very sticky situation - but could it be that they have a whole lot more in common than meets the eye?
_______
Readers are loving Anxious People!
'Backman never disappoints . . . heartwarming and multi layered' 5***** READER REVIEW
'As always Backman manages to delight . . . a really satisfying ending that makes you feel better about the world' 5***** READER REVIEW
'A wonderfully unusual tale, told with flair and finesse that is so wonderful it is sure to cure everything that ails you. Don't miss out on this beautiful book' 5***** READER REVIEW
'This novel is about humanity at its most raw and at its most wonderful and I LOVED it!' 5***** READER REVIEW
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin
- Publication date20 Aug. 2020
- File size4568 KB
Product description
Review
I laughed, I sobbed, I recommended it to literally everyone I know ― Buzzfeed
Funny, compassionate and wise . . . an absolute joy -- AJ Pearce, bestselling author of Dear Mrs Bird
Captures the messy essence of being human. It's clever and affecting, as likely to make you laugh out loud as it is to make you cry ― Washington Post
I loved this book. Funny, sad, clever, insightful, surprising and hopeful. Brilliant in every way -- Sarah Morgan, bestselling author of One Summer in Paris
A satisfying remedy for pandemic anxiety . . . It's laugh-out-loud funny and will help restore your faith in humanity ― Independent Daily Edition
Witty, observant, and unpredictable . . . darkly humorous ― Nouse
'19 New Books to Read in September' ― E! Online
Another smash hit . . . With Backman's stunning characters combined with a closed-room mystery, this has all of the ingredients for a novel all your friends will be talking about -- Shane Mullen ― Ebene Magazine
A surprisingly sweet tale. It's the perfect balance of heartwarming and heart-wrenching, and Fredrik Backman [...] has a way of simply yet elegantly describing relationships. We can all be idiots, but we're still all human beings worthy of connection and love ― National Public Radio Book Concierge
Endearing . . . A surefooted insight into the absurdity, beauty and ache of life ― Guardian
A master of writing delightful, insightful, soulful, character-driven narratives. He writes so humorously and poignantly about life, marriage, parenthood, love and death ― USA Today
A quirky, big-hearted novel. Wry, wise, and often laugh-out-loud funny, it's a wholly original story that delivers pure pleasure ― People
An endlessly entertaining mood booster ― Real Simple
This book examines how a shared event can change the course of many lives at once. And if you like strongly drawn characters and a mix of humor and heartbreak, this one's for you ― The Skimm
A witty, lighthearted romp...Backman charms ― Publishers Weekly
A deeply funny and warm examination of how individual experiences can bring a random group of people together. Backman reveals each character's many imperfections with tremendous empathy, reminding us that people are always more than the sum of their flaws ― BookPage
A tight-knit, surprise-filled narrative. The brisk, absorbing action prompts meditation on marriage, parenting, responsibility, and global economic pressures. Comedy, drama, mystery, and social study, this novel is undefinable except for the sheer reading pleasure it delivers. Highly recommended ― Library Journal (starred review)
Backman's latest novel focuses on how a shared event can change the course of multiple people's lives even in times of deep and ongoing anxiousness. A story with both comedy and heartbreak sure to please Backman fans ― Kirkus Reviews
Brilliant, funny, and compassionate . . . wonderfully charming ― Purple Revolver
A compassionate story of imperfect people doing the best they can to navigate life in an imperfect world ― The Leader Wrexham
This book promises laughs, heartwarming drama, and a whole lot of madness, but at the heart of it is something we can all relate to: being human ― InYourArea
Praise for Fredrik Backman ― -
I utterly believed in the residents of Beartown, and felt ripped apart by the events in the book -- Jojo Moyes ― bestselling author of Me Before You
Surrounded by impenetrable forests, [Beartown] recreates the stifling atmosphere of a dying community. This is a mature, compassionate novel ― The Sunday Times --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
From the Back Cover
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A bank robbery. A hostage drama. A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point, much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea.
This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it's always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you're trying to be a reasonably good human being for.
Because there's such an unbelievable amount that we're all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You're supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you're supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We're not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we're normal, that we're reasonably well educated, that we understand 'amortization levels' and 'inflation rates.' That we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don't know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there'll be another one coming along tomorrow.
Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn't feel like it's ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don't know how, because it's so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up.
Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.
One single really bad idea. That's all it takes.
One morning, for instance, a thirty-nine-year-old resident of a not particularly large or noteworthy town left home clutching a pistol, and that was'in hindsight'a really stupid idea. Because this is a story about a hostage drama, but that wasn't the intention. That is to say, it was the intention that it should be a story, but it wasn't the intention that it should be about a hostage drama. It was supposed to be about a bank robbery. But everything got a bit messed up, because sometimes that happens with bank robberies. So the thirty-nine-year-old bank robber fled, but with no escape plan, and the thing about escape plans is just like what the bank robber's mom always said years ago, when the bank robber forgot the ice cubes and slices of lemon in the kitchen and had to run back: 'If your head isn't up to the job, your legs better be!' (It should be noted that when she died, the bank robber's mom consisted of so much gin and tonic that they didn't dare cremate her because of the risk of explosion, but that doesn't mean she didn't have good advice to offer.) So after the bank robbery that wasn't actually a bank robbery, the police showed up, of course, so the bank robber got scared and ran out, across the street and into the first door that presented itself. It's probably a bit harsh to label the bank robber an idiot simply because of that, but' well, it certainly wasn't an act of genius. Because the door led to a stairwell with no other exits, which meant the bank robber's only option was to run up the stairs.
It should be noted that this particular bank robber had the same level of fitness as the average thirty-nine-year-old. Not one of those big-city thirty-nine-year-olds who deal with their midlife crisis by buying ridiculously expensive cycling shorts and swimming caps because they have a black hole in their soul that devours Instagram pictures, more the sort of thirty-nine-year-old whose daily consumption of cheese and carbohydrates was more likely to be classified medically as a cry for help rather than a diet. So by the time the bank robber reached the top floor, all sorts of glands had opened up, causing breathing that sounded like something you usually associate with the sort of secret societies that demand a password through a hatch in the door before they let you in. By this point, any chance of evading the police had dwindled to pretty much nonexistent.
But by chance the robber turned and saw that the door to one of the apartments in the building was open, because that particular apartment happened to be up for sale and was full of prospective buyers looking around. So the bank robber stumbled in, panting and sweaty, holding the pistol in the air, and that was how this story ended up becoming a hostage drama.
And then things went the way they did: the police surrounded the building, reporters showed up, the story made it onto the television news. The whole thing went on for several hours, until the bank robber had to give up. There was no other choice. So all eight people who had been held hostage, seven prospective buyers and one real estate agent, were released. A couple of minutes later the police stormed the apartment. But by then it was empty.
No one knew where the bank robber had gone.
That's really all you need to know at this point. Now the story can begin.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B081RGCWTS
- Publisher : Penguin (20 Aug. 2020)
- Language : English
- File size : 4568 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 400 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 364 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer reviews:
About the author

Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, and two novellas, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime, as well as one work of nonfiction, Things My Son Needs to Know About the World. His books are published in more than forty countries. His next novel, Anxious People, will be published in September 2020. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Facebook and Twitter @BackmanLand or on Instagram @Backmansk.
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 February 2021
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The main things I got from this story was love can make you do idiotic things, and you can never surely know what's happening in someone's life and how they really feel unless you talk to one another.
All of the characters here bonded over their life stories, choices, differences and similarities and although the situation was strange and stressful, the kindness in these strangers was absolute. I really cant praise this book enough. I think I'm going to have a long lasting book hangover with this one!
Usually in a review I say a little about the characters and the plot but with this one I cant - because whatever I said would be a spoiler. Reading this book I felt I was on a switchback staircase with multiple turns. The way the story is woven is clever - in spite of the twists I never lost my way, and I ran through a gamut of emotions - sadness, hope, and joy.
There are a few books where 5 stars just isn't enough. This is one of them.