A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

Ove is the sort of man who checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick.

He was a man of black and white. And she was colour. All the colour he had.

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned round in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.

all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his. She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that.

‘Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say,’

And that laughter of hers which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast.

‘You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away,’

And when one of her girlfriends asked why she loved him she answered that most men ran away from an inferno. But men like Ove ran into it.

‘You’re the funniest thing she knows. That’s why she always draws you in colour,’ says Parvaneh.

difference between being wicked because one has to be or because one can.

are always optimists when it comes to time, we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.

‘Loving someone is like moving into a house,’ Sonja used to say. ‘At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather its imperfections.

is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.

‘Give my love to Sonja and thank her for the loan,’