Fredrik Backman

It's going to be a grand adventure and a fairy tale of marvels. But it's my fault that you'll find a dragon at the end, my darling knight.

We thought she'd save him. We all hoped so much that she'd save him because it would have been like a fairy tale and when one had lived in the dark for so long it's very difficult not to believe in fairy tales.

There are certainly a good number of alternatives to "shit," if you have a particular need to express such a feeling.

You should choose your battles if you can, but if the battle chooses you then kick the sod in his fuse box!

Soccer forces life to move on. There__ always a new match. A new season. There__ always a dream that everything can get better. It__ a game of wonders.

When it comes to terror, reality__ got nothing on the power of the imagination[.]

Humanity has many shortcomings, but none is stronger than pride.

Rune never said anything about it. But to anyone who had known him a long time, it was as if he grew a few centimetres shorter in the years that followed. As if he sort of crumpled with a deep sigh and never really breathed properly again.

The women glare at each other. Grin. You have friends when you're fifteen years old. Sometimes you get them back.

Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don't share it there's a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.

He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy.

It's been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn't sneakily turned up the heating.

And in an apartment on the other side of town, everyone wakes up with a start when the hound in the first-floor flat, without any warning, starts howling. Louder and more heartrendingly than anything they have ever heard coming out of the primal depths of any animal. As if it is singing with the sorrow and yearning of an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales. It howls for hours, all through the night, until dawn. And when the morning light seeps into the hospital room, Elsa wakes up in Granny's arms. But Granny is still in Miamas.

She just smiled, said that she loved books more than anything, and started telling him excitedly what each of the ones in her lap was about. And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.

Life is a Curious Thing. Winter turns to spring and Parvaneh passes her driving test. Of teaches Adrian how to change tires. The kid may have bought a Toyota, but that doesn't mean he's entirely beyond help, Ove explains to Sonja when he visits her one Sunday in April. The he shows her some photographs of Parvaneh's little boy. Four months old and as fat as a seal pup. Patrick has tried to force one of those cell phone camera things on Ove, but he doesn't trust them. So he walks around with a thick wad of paper copies inside his wallet instead, held together by a rubber band. Shows everyone he meets. Even the people who work at the florist's,

Anita is small and colourless in her grey trousers, grey knitted cardigan, grey hair and grey skin. But ove notices that her face is slightly red-eyed and swollen. Quickly she wipes her eyes and blinks away the pain. As women of that generation do. As if they stood in the doorway every morning, determinedly driving sorrow out of the house with a broom.

Normal life is presentable. In normal life, you clean up the kitchen and keep your balcony tidy and take care of your children. It's hard work--harder than one might think.