Leonora Craig Cohen
Out & About
Britt-Marie Was Here
By Fredrik Backman (Translated by Henning Koch)
Sceptre 298pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Britt-Marie is tactless, persistent to the point of absurdity and, according to her husband, Kent, ‘socially incompetent’. She is not the sort of woman you would want to be stuck in a car with and one might dread being stuck in a book with her just as much. Over the course of Britt-Marie Was Here, Fredrik Backman does an impressive job of making the reader see her innate value, even if she never ceases to be a bit of a nuisance to those around her.
We first meet Britt-Marie sitting in an unemployment office, fretting over the proper arrangement of cutlery drawers and alienating the young woman who has been assigned to help her find a job. She has no education and hasn’t worked since 1978. Having just caught her husband cheating on her, she
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf