Jon Platt, owner of Nonesuch Books in South Portland, Maine, has sold 1,700 copies of Ove-a total exceeded only by Harry Potter-and credits the book’s success to the fact that Backman “doesn’t shy away from life’s difficulties, and how people are. To further grease the skids, Sweden announced this week that the film of Ove would be its official selection for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Backman’s next book, My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry, in which a 7-year-old is assigned by her grandmother to deliver a series of letters to people the grandmother has wronged, also started slowly, but is also now firmly ensconced on the bestseller lists, with 240,000 copies in print.īut it is Ove that is the real underground sensation, and with a film version (already a hit throughout Scandinavia and Germany) due out in the States later this month, the book seems to be set for a long run of popularity. It has remained there for more than 30 weeks, rising as high as #2 in The New York Times paperback rankings, and now boasts more than 650,000 copies in hardcover, paperback, and e-book editions. Six months after it came out in paperback, A Man Called Ove, which Borland calls “a great word-of-mouth, reader driven success,” hit the bestseller lists. That helped jump start Ove-mania, and it didn’t hurt that People magazine gave it a rave, saying “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll feel new sympathy for the curmudgeons in your life.” The indie bookstore network started to get the word out, and when Ove came out in paperback in May 2015, a major store in Maine named it their book of the year and began selling copies by the truckload.

Atria’s independent bookstore sales reps went out of their way to push the novel. And although the book enjoyed solid pre-publication reviews from the trades, it was ignored by major outlets like The New York Times, with sales that didn’t exactly encourage confidence. printing of Backman’s novel was only 6,600 copies. Filled with humor and pathos, it was about a curmudgeonly and suicidal man in his late fifties who seemed at war with the modern world and his neighbors.īorland liked the book, liked its sympathetic tone and subtle wit, liked what eventually became a tale of a suffering man who, thanks to those same neighbors, comes out of his shell. The book was by an unknown writer, but the story he told wasn’t another brooding, Scandinavian mystery like Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a genre that had been selling like crazy over the past several years.įredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove was, in fact, a ray of sunshine compared to the dark night of those novels-a touchy-feely look at what it means to be human. Three years ago, when Atria Books Editorial Director Peter Borland was sent the first 50 pages of a novel translated from the Swedish, he had no idea that what he held in his hands would become a national sensation.

Book a man called ove review