Fredrik Backman

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier. There’s Joar, who never backs down from a fight; quiet and bookish Ted who is mourning his father; Ali, the daughter of a man who never stays in one place for long; and finally, there’s the artist, a boy who hoards sleeping pills and shuns attention, but who possesses an extraordinary gift that might be his ticket to a better life. These four lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be put into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. As she struggles to decide what to do with this bequest, she embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn the story of how the painting came to be. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit, but happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this fresh testament to the transformative power of friendship and art.

My Friends

Emma Hak-Kovacs

Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that's pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us. Fragile hearts break in palaces and dark alleys alike.

He runs after her, but of course he doesn't stand a chance, he's a grown man and they don't have a clue about how to run. Grown men don't have enough things they're afraid of on this planet to become good at running.

…the first person to stop laughing was obviously the artist, his joy never lasted very long, his skin was too thin to keep reality out.

He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that's how we learn to figure out our horizons.

The summer started and ended with death. But in between? In between, the summer managed to be plenty of other things too. It managed to be love and friendship, miraculously loud laughter and magnificently stupid decisions. They put fireworks in mailboxes, rode shopping carts down the steepest hill in town and tried to dry wet socks in a toaster, because what else are you supposed to do when you’re fourteen? Due of boredom?

They were twelve years old when they met Ted, when Joar rode his bicycle into him, because Joar was good at a lot of things, but bad at braking. "Meet" is probably the wrong word, no one met Joar, because you don't "meet" a natural disaster, you get hit by it.

"l want you to be happy when l'm gone," he had whispered to Ted one evening, just before he fell asleep. It was a lot to ask, of course. Having a heart is heavy, far too heavy for some of us. But Ted had promised to try.

Ted was only planning to stay for a short while, but that turned into the rest of the artist's life. At first they both pretended that it was for Ted's sake, that he had needed a vacation. But really it was the artist who needed a home, and home was Ted's snoring in the darkness, like when they were kids, back in the basement.

When he was thirty-two, he was having panic attacks So often that he forgot how his body had felt before them. He bought an enormous apartment and filled it with beautiful things, but slept on a mattress in the hall, curled up like a cat. He was tricked out of half a fortune, gave the other half away voluntarily, he looked for love in all the wrong places and got his heart crushed in every possible way. He stopped going out, his skin was too thin for fame, and his lungs too small for the top of the world.

It wouldn't have made any difference if Joar and Ali’s love had lasted eighty years, it was already everything right from the start, bright light and loud bangs and heart attacks.

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