Fredrik Backman: The Stories That Make You Sit With People

I am, unabashedly, a fangirl.

By 2025, I had read almost every Fredrik Backman book available in English. Beartown. Anxious People. A Man Called Ove. My Grandmother Sends Her Apologies and She’s Sorry. Britt-Marie Was Here. The Answer is No. All of them. And I am not remotely sorry about it.

I read Beartown in January 2022, recommended by a dear friend who said it restored her faith in fiction writing. Since she has extremely high standards, I knew this would be something. I was not wrong.

One of the heaviest books I have ever read. And one of the most riveting. That combination sounds like a contradiction until you’re inside it, and then it makes complete sense. Beartown might seem like a book about sport, but it is also about how sport shapes the lives of those directly and indirectly involved. At the heart of it is a rape, and Backman holds a mirror up to how people respond to it. As a woman, as a mother of two girls, it infuriated and saddened me that across the globe, we react the same way. Victim shaming. Questioning motives. Calling the perpetrator just a boy. Backman doesn’t let you look away. The story is so dramatic. The people feel so real that abandoning them mid-crisis feels wrong. You stay because you have to. Because leaving would feel like a betrayal of people you’ve never met and somehow already know.

I missed his characteristic humour in this one. But that is what the story needed.

I did not have the strength to pick up the sequel, Us Against You, until December of that same year. First book of the year. Last book of the year. Somehow fitting, and very intentional.

By then I had read everything else in between.

Anxious People did something different. It made me aware, mid-read, of how quickly I had decided what was happening and who was responsible. The blurb reads like a thriller. A bank robbery gone wrong, a hostage situation, a missing perpetrator. Yet it is not that at all. Backman leads you confidently in one direction and then, without fanfare, shows you that you were assembling the wrong picture the entire time. Not as a twist. As a quiet lesson in how fast we judge and how much we miss because of it. I’ve written about bias in this series already. Anxious People is a masterclass in it, disguised as a hostage comedy.

But the one that stays with me most is A Man Called Ove.

Reading it is like peeling an onion. Every chapter reveals something new, not just about Ove but about the road that built him. The grumpiness that seems like personality turns out to be grief wearing a familiar face. The rigidity that seems like character turns out to be love that had nowhere left to go. A grumpy old man isn’t born a grumpy old man. Lived experiences got him there. And once you understand the road someone took, you understand why they arrived where they did. You don’t have to agree with them. You just can’t dismiss them anymore.

That’s what Backman does that I keep returning to.
He makes dismissal impossible.

And then Britt-Marie gets her own book. The woman you spent an entire novel finding irritating, particular, precise, a little exhausting, turns out to have a whole road behind her. A woman who spent a lifetime living for others until she was merely existing. And the road she took to become that woman is devastating and completely logical and by the end you’re not finding her irritating at all. You’re finding her extraordinary. Backman looked at a character most writers would have left in the margins and said, no, she has a whole story. And she did.

The Answer is No does in a short story what most novels fail to do in three hundred pages. Each book is different in tone and weight and world. What holds them together is this insistence that every person you encounter, the difficult ones, the odd ones, the ones who seem like they exist only to obstruct, is carrying something you haven’t been told about yet.

He uses humour to get you there. You laugh, you move through it, you don’t notice when the tone shifts. And by the time it does, you’re already inside. Already paying attention. Already too involved to protect yourself from what’s coming.

And then something arrives. Unannounced. Trivial. Just sitting there in the middle of everything else. And it just clicks because you’ve been with these people long enough to feel the weight of it.

Backman’s writing is so powerful that I reel. I reel and I yearn.

I want to write like that. Characters that stay with you for days afterward, that come back at a moment you least expect, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, because something you saw or heard reminded you of them and suddenly they feel more real than some people you actually know. I want my readers bawling their eyes out because they feel the pain of the characters. I want them smiling and guffawing and utterly confused about who to cheer on.

Stories that don’t explain themselves. Stories that give you someone to sit with. And trust you to find your way to them.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.