Johanna Kjellander, temporarily resident in room eight, is a priest without a vocation, and, as of last week, without a parish.
Per Persson, the hotel receptionist, just wants to mind his own business, and preferably not get murdered. When it happens at a certain grotty hotel in south Stockholm, it's particularly awkward because the money belongs to the hitman currently staying in room seven. AND AGAIN.It's always awkward when five thousand kronor goes missing. But don’t we just need a good laugh sometimes? Highly recommended.A madcap new novel from the one-of-a-kind author of The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO START AGAIN. A means of learning Western history? Not so much. It’s now been sold to 30 countries, and seems to have universal appeal. The page-turner has made Jonasson a European publishing phenom, after his novel was repeatedly turned down by American and British publishers. He meets Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, de Gaulle, Lyndon Johnson, Einstein…and the list goes on and on, as he’s involved in one adventure after another. Later he contributes to the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. (He tends to blow things up.) In Spain he saves the life of Francisco Franco. He flees to Paris and then to Rome after trouble with the law. He drops in on Lenin during the Bolshevik Revolution. As a child he befriends Carl Faberge (“Uncle Carl”) in Russia. It seems the explosives expert with a fondness for vodka has been personally involved in just about every momentous historical event during his lifetime, à la Forrest Gump. As protagonist Allan Karlsson is chased across Sweden by the criminal gang who want their cash back, he shares with the reader a tour-de-force view of his life. Jonas Jonasson’s re-imagination of history and its most familiar players, seen through the recalled experiences of a comfy-slippered centenarian who runs away from a retirement home with a suitcase full of money, is over-the-top hilarious. Swedish noir may be a hot literary commodity, but apparently Swedish writers are also capable of producing humor on a grand scale. The 100-year-old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
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