Fredrik Backman

Over the course of two weeks, everything in Beartown will change. 

Maya Andersson and Benji Ovich, two young people who left in search of a life far from the forest town, come home and joyfully reunite with their closest childhood friends. There is a new sense of optimism and purpose in the town, embodied in the impressive new ice rink that has been built down by the lake.

Two years have passed since the events that no one wants to think about. Everyone has tried to move on, but there’s something about this place that prevents it. The destruction caused by a ferocious late-summer storm reignites the old rivalry between Beartown and the neighboring town of Hed, a rivalry which has always been fought through their ice hockey teams.

Maya’s parents, Peter and Kira, are caught up in an investigation of the hockey club’s murky finances, and Amat—once the star of the Beartown team—has lost his way after an injury and a failed attempt to get drafted into the NHL. Simmering tensions between the two towns turn into acts of intimidation and then violence. All the while, a fourteen-year-old boy grows increasingly alienated from this hockey-obsessed community and is determined to take revenge on the people he holds responsible for his beloved sister’s death. He has a pistol and a plan that will leave Beartown with a loss that is almost more that it can stand.

As it beautifully captures all the complexities of daily life and explores questions of friendship, loyalty, loss, and identity, this emotion-packed novel asks us to reconsider what it means to win, what it means to lose, and what it means to forgive.

A Novel

The Winners

Alina

He took all the bright summer mornings, all the crisp autumn air, the snow under her feet, laughter that makes your chest hurt, everything that was simple. Most people can’t pinpoint the exact moment when they stop being little children, but Maya can, Kevin took her childhood and when she moved here she tore and ripped and scratched out a little bit of it and reclaimed it.

So there ought to be two words for that, one for the home which can carry you through your darkest moments, and one for the home which binds you. Because sometimes we stay in towns and marriages simply because we would otherwise have no story. We have too much in common. We think no one else would be able to under-stand us.

No one who is out sees him, no one offers to help, all they care about is flags.

Admittedly, Benjamin moved abroad two years ago and no longer plays hockey, but he was actually HOMOSEXUAL, did the reporter know that? “Not that it makes any difference to us, of course, in this club we treat everyone the same!” Tails declared, without really explaining why he didn’t feel the need to identify all of the other players on the team by their sexual orientation.

The most unbearable thing about death is that the world just goes on. Time doesn’t care. The morning after the storm, the sun goes up as if it’s mocking us, over a wrecked forest and a battered town.

but one tomorrow Ramona was no more, and it was incomprehensible that the sun still rose. That it could bear to. That it dared to.

When we are little we grieve for the person we have lost, but when we’re older we grieve even more for ourselves. He wept for her loneliness, but also his own.

He did everything they asked. He did everything right. And everything still went to hell.

Matteo’s big sister had a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder, in secret, obviously, her parents would have gone mad. She chose it after reading that a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a storm on the other side of the planet. She felt so powerless that this was the most powerful thing she could dream of being: an insect.

Not the way you long for the future, for the summer, or for a holiday, but the way you long to get back to yourself. To how it was “in our day,” even though that time never really existed except in our filtered memories. You long to be the person you think you were, during some sort of youth when you tell yourself that life was uncomplicated, or the man you imagine you could have been if only you had the chance to do everything again. Not longing for that is difficult for most people, and for some it is all but impossible.

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