I finished reading “A Man Called Ove” a few days ago and loved it so much that I immediately grabbed another book by Fredrik Backman. While “Anxious People” is good; same wonderful character development, funny dialogue and good storyline, it just wasn’t as amazing as “Ove”.

This shouldn’t dissuade anyone from reading it, however, because it is quite good and had I read these two books in opposite order I would probably be raving about it. The wonderful thing that these two books have in common is that they don’t ask a lot of the reader. Your only function is to get immersed in the story and let it unfold as it happens.

As the author states in the second paragraph, “This story is about a lot of things, but mostly it’s 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 trying to be a reasonably good human being for.”

“Anxious People” is really about a group of normal people all trying to do their best at adulting and hopefully, by some miracle, not making a huge cocked-up mess of things.