Book Discussion Group, Saturday, December 3, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Carl Fredrik Backman is a Swedish novelist and blogger. He was born in 1981 in Helsingborg, Sweden, in 1981, and grew up there. He briefly studied comparative religion in college, but dropped out to become a truck driver. While he was still working as a truck driver, he was contacted by the owner of a free newspaper, Xtra, to write an article for that publication. After that, he wrote that article, he wrote several more for Xtra and then started to write as a freelancer for other publications. He published his first novel, A Man Called Ove, in 2012 in Sweden. Its  US release was in 2014. Backman has also written a nonfiction book, Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, which was released the same day as Ove in 2012, and two more novels, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry (2013), and Britt-Marie Was Here (2014).Source.

Click this link for a brief magazine interview with Backman, and if you read Swedish, click this link to visit Fredrik Backman's blog.

Ove—The Movie

The movie version of A Man Called Ove was released in Sweden in 2015, and an English-subtitled version started touring the US about a month ago. Below is the official trailer.