What is Anxious People about?

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.

The novel's central argument is that everyone is carrying more than they show, and that small, accidental kindnesses — the kind that happen when strangers are thrown together — are sometimes the only intervention that works. This is Backman's fullest statement of a theme he has been developing since A Man Called Ove, and it is handled with more structural sophistication here. The mystery format (who is the robber, where did they go) gives the novel a forward pull that A Man Called Ove's episodic structure doesn't have.

Anxious People is funnier than its premise and sadder than its comedy suggests. The title is literal and not ironic: the book is genuinely interested in anxiety as a condition — the kind that makes people make bad decisions, the kind that comes from looking at the world and not knowing how to hold it. Whether that's your anxiety or everyone's is part of what the novel asks you to sit with.