Ten years ago, a man stood on a bridge. A teenage boy happened upon the scene and tried to talk to that man, but failed to stop him from jumping. Anxious People 📚 is not about that man, but it just may be about that bridge. Superficially it’s about a bank robbery gone wrong, ending in a hostage situation, but, as the author says, it’s more about stupid people. And it’s not really about stupid people either: it’s just about people with issues, and some bad decisions, when they’re just trying to be good.

The robbery is covered fast-forward style in the first chapter. After that, the book progresses on two levels: present time, with the police interviewing the witnesses, trying to figure out how it is possible that the robber vanished after letting the hostages go, and in the past, during the hostage situation. Sometimes the author takes a bit of time to just address the reader directly in some commentary of the situation.

The hostages, taken in an open house event, are a colorful lot of people. There is, for example, a retired house flipper couple Anna-Lena and Roger; pregnant female couple Julia & Ro; and bank manager Zara, who looks at middle class people with the same slightly disgusted curiosity that a child might look at a particularly big and slimy bug. Occasionally we also get flashback chapters about Zara visiting her therapist.

When you review books in The StoryGraph, one of the standard questions there is “Are character flaws a main focus?”. I’ve never quite understood what that even means, but after reading Anxious People I can quite confidently say that yes, the flaws of the characters are a main focus in this book. During the police interviews they appear rather infuriating, but little by little you learn more and more about them and come to like them. They are all flawed but just trying their best.

The book is set in an unnamed small town in Sweden, an hour or two away from the capital, Stockholm. Much like in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, the town police resent their colleagues in the capital. The bosses of their bosses would always want to send them backup from Stockholm for any crime more serious than a speeding ticket, and a hostage situation is definitely one of those, so the local police are under pressure to solve the case by themselves before “help” arrives. “Stockholm”, it turns out, has become something of a curse word among all the townspeople, who feel that Stockholmers believe they’re better than the rest. Still, even Stockholmers have their own “Stockholmers”, possibly in Berlin or in New York.

The author seems to have unloaded a great deal of personal emotions into the book. In the afterwords he mentions someone he couldn’t help and whom he wished could have coped a little longer. At the very end there’s even a list of some actual resources and services that you can turn to if you feel lonely or even worse.

Like HHhH, I found this one for The StoryGraph Reads the World challenge. Here, Chad didn’t even let me down and actually suggested a book written by a Swedish author and set in Sweden too. I also simply enjoyed reading this book.