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What it argues
Anxious People begins with a failed bank robbery. The would-be robber, who doesn't actually have a gun, flees into the nearest open door — a real estate viewing for an apartment in a small Swedish town — and accidentally takes a roomful of strangers hostage. The strangers include a pregnant woman, a young couple buying their first home, an elderly man, a retired couple trying to sell their apartment, and a woman who is clearly not what she appears to be. When the police arrive, no one quite agrees on what happened, and eventually the robber vanishes.
The novel is structured as an investigation: a father-and-son police duo is trying to reconstruct the hostage incident from interviews with each of the apartment viewers. What they slowly discover is that every person in that room was having the worst day of their life for reasons that had nothing to do with the robbery, and that the robbery itself interrupted a series of private crises at the moment each person most needed interrupting. Backman braids these backstories with the investigation, revealing what connected these strangers before and after the apartment, until what seemed like a chaotic farce reveals itself as something more carefully architected.
What it gets right
- 1.
Backman structures the novel as a mystery in which the actual mystery (who was the robber) matters far less than the question of who each of these people is and what they needed from the day.
- 2.
Every hostage is in crisis before the robbery begins — the robbery is structurally an excuse to gather people whose lives were already colliding without their knowledge.
- 3.
The father-son police duo carries the novel's meta-argument about communication: two people who love each other can fail to say the one thing that would help for years.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Fredrik Backman is a Swedish author and journalist whose novels have sold over twelve million copies worldwide and been translated into more than forty languages. He began his writing career as a blogger and columnist before publishing A Man Called Ove in 2012. Subsequent novels include My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, Beartown, and Us Against You. Anxious People, published in Sweden in 2019 and internationally in 2020, became his bestselling novel to date and was adapted into a Netflix series in 2021. Backman is known for accessible prose, ensemble casts, and an unflinching attention to ordinary human suffering.
