Anxious People

Anxious People is Fredrik Backman's 2020 novel, the New York Times bestseller and the structurally most ambitious novel in his career after the Beartown trilogy. The structural premise is a failed bank robber who takes a New Year's Eve apartment-viewing of approximately eight strangers hostage in a small Swedish town. The novel cross-cuts between the hostage-situation present, the police investigation in the immediate aftermath (interviews with each of the released hostages), and the longer-arc backstory of each hostage that the novel slowly reveals across approximately thirty short chapters. The actual hostage-and-bank-robber sequence is the structural conceit; the novel is actually about what every character in the apartment is carrying that day.

Backman's structural method is the patient short-chapter cross-cutting that lets the novel rotate through approximately eight hostage backstories without losing the propulsive hostage-situation frame. The novel reads in the literary commercial register Backman established with A Man Called Ove (2012) and refined across the Beartown trilogy. The Jim-and-Jack father-and-son police-investigator subplot is the structural emotional engine of the back half and the part that earns the late-novel reveal about who the bank robber actually was. The novel's structural argument (that contemporary anxiety, parental grief, financial precariousness, and the specific Swedish welfare-state context produce the operational interior of every adult who happens to be in a Stockholm apartment on the wrong New Year's Eve) is made through the texture of each hostage backstory rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary translated literary fiction reading, as the right Backman entry point alongside A Man Called Ove and the Beartown trilogy, and for fans of contemporary literary commercial fiction across translated and English-language markets. The 2021 Netflix limited series adaptation directed by Felix Herngren is the strongest of any Backman screen production. The Marin Ireland audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.