Anxious people A novel

Review by Booklist Review

When the world's most hapless bank robber inadvertently takes a group of the world's most helpful people hostage, hilarity doesn't exactly ensue as much as it evolves. With a failed marriage, no job, potential loss of child custody, and a looming eviction, the idea of robbing a bank presents itself as an appealing solution to this harrowing list of woes. When the bank turns out to be one of those new-fangled cashless entities, the foiled robber flees and dashes into a nearby apartment building where an eclectic group of potential buyers is suffering through a sale's pitch. Unwitting participants in the developing drama, the group nonetheless warms to their wannabe-bank-robber captor and each other over the course of the day's events. In this small suburb of Stockholm, only the local police are on the scene, a father-and-son team who try hard not to step on each other's toes while deescalating the hostage situation and interviewing witnesses. With poignant and sympathetic care, the always incisive and charming Backman (Us Against You, 2017), gently examines garden-variety insecurities against a quaint pre-pandemic backdrop.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A diverse assortment of Swedes gets caught in an unlikely hostage situation in Backman's witty, lighthearted romp (after Us Against You). On the day before New Year's Eve, in a "not particularly large or noteworthy town," a desperate parent attempts to rob a bank in order to provide for two young children. After the police arrive, the amateur stickup artist flees and stumbles into an apartment's open house. The attendees, including a heavily pregnant, first-time home-buying lesbian couple; an apartment-flipping older couple; and Zara, an executive at another bank, become hostages. Meanwhile, father and son police officers Jim and Jack scramble into action. The appearance of a man wearing nothing but underwear and a bunny mask, hired by the flippers to sabotage the open house, adds to the drama. Backman layers the hostage scene with threads of backstory on Zara's regret for denying a loan to a man ten years earlier, along with developments in Jack and Jim's investigation. While the prose is chockablock with odd metaphors ("Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of") and a plot twist leans on societal assumptions, Backman charms with his empathetic description of the robber, who gradually earns sympathy from the hostages. This amusing send-up of contemporary Swedish society is worth a look. Agent: Tor Jonasson, Salomonsson Agency. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Marin Ireland has a mere couple dozen audio credits--the majority of them in the last few years--yet she's undoubtedly one of the industry's most versatile, consistently stupendous narrators. Returning for her third Backman pairing, Ireland superbly brings to life the vast cast with enviably distinct and effortlessly fluid characterizations. The story's center is a hostage situation during an open house: a failed bank robbery, financial collapse, adultery, and suicide are just some of the challenges that loom over the crowd trapped inside the apartment. And yet the narrative's soul turns out to be unexpected lifesaving connections. Ireland gets every character just right: the father and son who make up the local police force; the desperate divorced mother who will do anything for her young children; the high-strung real estate agent; the disgruntled, acerbic executive; the lesbian couple about to become parents; the octogenarian waiting for her husband; the always-in-search-of-a-bargain husband-and-wife fix-it team; the bunny-suited stranger hogging the bathroom. Somehow, Ireland becomes a co-conspirator, enjoying the pizza, smoking in the closet, chatting books. VERDICT Balancing--so remarkably well!--big topics with whimsy and charm, Backman continues his bestselling success; Ireland, meanwhile, proves why audiences everywhere need to listen in.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Eight people become unlikely friends during a hostage situation created by an inept bank robber. In a town in Sweden, a desperate parent turns to bank robbery to help pay the rent. Unfortunately, the target turns out to be a cashless bank, which means that no robbery can take place. In an attempt to flee the police, the would-be perpetrator runs into a nearby apartment building and interrupts an open house, causing the would-be buyers to assume they're being held hostage. After the situation has ended with an absent bank robber and blood on the carpet, a father-and-son police pair work through maddening interviews with the witnesses: the ridiculous realtor; an older couple who renovates and sells apartments in an effort to stay busy; a bickering young couple expecting their first child; a well-off woman interested only in the view from the balcony of a significant bridge in her life; an elderly woman missing her husband as New Year's Eve approaches; and, absurdly, an actor dressed as a rabbit hired to disrupt the showing and drive down the apartment price. 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. The observer/narrator is winding and given to tangents and, in early moments, might distract a bit too much from the strongly drawn characters. But the story gains energy and sureness as it develops, resulting in moments of insight and connection between its numerous amiable characters. A story with both comedy and heartbreak sure to please Backman fans. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 1 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. Excerpted from Anxious People: A Novel by Fredrik Backman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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