GENRE: CONTEMPORARY FICTION EXPLORING THEMES OF MEMORY, GRIEF LOVE AND LOYALTY

This book, originally written in Swedish, could be set in any town where people live in housing estates. It’s about a 59-year-old curmudgeon (I’ve always wanted to use that word) who lives in a housing estate and hates deviation from routine and people who don’t obey rules. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. Many of his neighbours see him as bitter. Slowly we learn about his childhood and young adulthood and can only admire him for continuing to engage with the World.

He loses his wife, his job and the neighbour with whom he routinely locked horns, can’t deal with hopelessness and meticulously plans to take his own life several times, but is thwarted each time by neighbours trying to engage with him. A chatty young couple with two young daughters are particularly persistent and he ends up adopting them as family. A stray cat adopts him and melts his heart a little more.

We see Ove begin a campaign against the bureaucracy that wants to put his once-hated neighbour, Rune, into care and attend a gay wedding because he has developed connection with the two young men and we see him take up the reins of his life again.

It’s a deceptively simple book written in an almost offhand way about a deliberately unlikeable character and yet it had me in tears by the end and uplifted by a renewed faith in humanity. I so found myself identifying with Ove. We all know at least one Ove and also have elements of him masked inside ourselves.