First Lines Friday – 17/01/2025

Good evening and welcome to this First Lines Friday post! It’s the end of another working week for a lot of people (myself included!) and the weekend is finally here. Do you have any exciting plans?

In last week’s Sunday Summary I set myself the challenge of featuring a book I purchased last Sunday in this First Lines Friday. I checked them all out before I made my decision on which was best. You should be able to guess which one from the opening lines.

Let’s get into today’s First Lines Friday introduction, then I’ll follow with the details of the book:


Ove is fifty-nine.

He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points the people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman torch. He stands at the counter of a shop where owners of Japanese cars come to purchase white cables. Ove eyes the sales assistant for a long time before shaking a medium-sized white box at him.

‘So this is one of those O-Pads, is it?’ he demands.

 


A Man Called Ove  – Fredrik Backman

Genre:  Contemporary fiction

Pages: 337

Audience: Adult

Publisher: Atria Books

Publication Date: 15 Jul 2014

 

Goodreads – A Man Called Ove

Ove is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots – joggers, neighbours who can’t reverse a trailer properly and shop assistants who talk in code.

But isn’t it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just so?

In the end, you will see, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible . . .


My Thoughts…

There is something about a curmudgeonly main character that appeals to me. We all know how hilarious the elderly and outspoken can be at the best of times.

Now more than ever it must be difficult to live in our modern world. With the only constant being change, I can imagine myself being very sympathetic to Ove and his experience of life in these 300-odd pages.

I’m looking forward to reading a refreshing change in perspective. It’s not very often that I read fiction with a protagonist like Ove. I pride myself on reading diversely, and so I should also read more from all characters, perspectives and walks of life.

Lending to my aims of reading more diversely, this book was originally published in Swedish and translated into English a year later. It’s not often I read translated works, but I’m glad to have gotten a copy of this ready to read.

Have you read A Man Called Ove?

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