Make sure to try his other book The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared though! This was easy to read, it even had moments where I chuckled a little, but it was a slightly below average experience for me. Allan Karlsson’s unworldliness meant he could get away with sometimes doing the wrong thing and still be likeable.

And it’s about people trying to escape the shadow of mistakes made by previous generations, people trying to find meaning, any kind of meaning, for their life. In an ironic aside in Chapter 57, the narrator acknowledges this lack of plot progression when he comments, "In some sense, one could say that they [the two main characters] were back in the vicinity of Chapter 16 of this story," but making a joke about this absence of forward progression doesn't make it ok. For me, it is the weakest of Jonasson's novels so far, owing mostly to a third act that grinds the action to a halt, before rushing somewhat unexpectedly to its ending. Among the early signs was Per describing Johanna as the strangest woman he’d ever met: a way of saying to the reader, “No, it’s not just you”.Citanje ove knjige ni mesec dana nakon Devojke koja je spasila kralja Svedske je otprilike bilo kao maraton gledanja Mocnih rendzera. This book has a very similar humor as was in The Hundred Year Old Man, but somehow the scale of it is much smaller. This unfunny supposed satire cum crime novel has nothing clever to say about any of its chosen subjects and, far from being entertaining or amusing, is deeply irritating and boring. She’s actually a near-genius intellect, it’s just that at the start of the book she hadn’t been to school).

Nu har jag läst ”Mördar-Anders och hans vänner (samt en och annan ovän)” och den får en trea i betyg från mig. In an ironic aside in Chapter 57, the narrator acknowledges this lack of plot progression when he comments, “In some sense, one could say that they [the two main characters] were back in the vicinity of Chapter 16 of this story,” but making a joke about this absence of forward progression doesn’t make it ok. Anyway it's the story of a hitman (duh), a quick-witted lapsed lady priest, and a misanthropist male receptionist. This time a recently freed hitman who refuses to kill any more teams up with a homeless receptionist and an athiest priest to make their fortune only maiming people. He became a media consultant and later set up a company producing sports and events for Swedish television, before selling his company and moving abroad to work on his first novel.I read The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared a few years ago – in Spanish I might add. Their constant scamming and Robin Hood-esque redistributions of wealth, may appear at first glance admirable, but their singular motivation always seems to be their own financial gain, leaving the reader pretty much disliking everyone in the whole book. Johanna Kjellander, a priest who doesn’t believe in God and only became a priest because her father and grandfather were priests. What’s more, thug-as-born-again-Christian sounds like a premise with plenty of comic potential, at least on this side of the Atlantic.

Quirky and fun, it’s very much about the characters and how they react to each other rather than the plot that lagged at times. Per Persson, the hotel receptionist, just wants to mind his own business, and preferably not get murdered. As wildly funny and unexpected as Jonasson's previous bestselling novels, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All is a zany, feel-good adventure story, tenderly and hilariously exploring belief, redemption, and the fact that it's never too late to start again. He had inherited his moral compass from his father, the drunkard (who had abandoned his son for a bottle of cognac when the boy was two years old), and from his grandfather, the horse dealer, a man who had dosed his foals with precise amounts of arsenic from birth onwards so that they would grow used to the poison and be in tip-top shape not only on the day of sale but, in slowly declining degrees, on the days, weeks and months after that.

I’d been apprehensive about Jonasson’s previous book, The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden, with its heroine from Soweto, and a title in several European languages that translated as “The Illiterate Who Saved the King of Sweden”. The characters are all so morally corrupt, that no matter how much good they try to do, it always left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Back at the hotel, he’s about to give this priest, Johanna Kjellander, the room next to the hitman, when a gangster-type drops in half the agreed fee for a job half done by the hitman. Seriously, take this first sentence: "Er, dessen Leben schon bald voll sein sollte von Tod und Gewalttaten, von Dieben und Gangstern, stand an der Rezeption eines der traurigsten Hotels von ganz Schweden und träumte vor sich hin.