The village was rocked after a junior team member was convicted of rape the previous spring, and the hockey club is in danger of being liquidated. As a new hockey season approaches, the Beartown team is in a precarious situation. With immense compassion and insight, Fredrik Backman-“the Dickens of our age” ( Green Valley News)-reveals how loyalty, friendship, and kindness can carry a town through its most challenging days.īackman (A Man Called Ove) returns to the hockey-obsessed village of his previous novel Beartown to chronicle the passion, violence, resilience, and humanity of the people who live there in this engrossing tale of small-town Swedish life. Here is a declaration of love for all the big and small, bright and dark stories that give form and color to our communities.

By the time the last goal is scored, a resident of Beartown will be dead, and the people of both towns will be forced to wonder if, after everything, the game they love can ever return to something as simple and innocent as a field of ice, two nets, and two teams. But bringing this team together proves to be a challenge as old bonds are broken, new ones are formed, and the town’s enmity with Hed grows more and more acute.Īs the big game approaches, the not-so-innocent pranks and incidents between the communities pile up and their mutual contempt intensifies. Soon a team starts to take shape around Amat, the fastest player you’ll ever see Benji, the intense lone wolf always dutiful and eager-to-please Bobo and Vidar, a born-to-be-bad troublemaker. As the tension mounts between the two adversaries, a newcomer arrives who gives Beartown hockey a surprising new coach and a chance at a comeback. What makes it worse is the obvious satisfaction that all the former Beartown players, who now play for a rival team in the neighboring town of Hed, take in that fact. So it’s a cruel blow when they hear that Beartown ice hockey might soon be disbanded. No matter how difficult times get, they’ve always been able to take pride in their local ice hockey team. Have you ever seen a town rise? Ours did that, too.Ī small community tucked deep in the forest, Beartown is home to tough, hardworking people who don’t expect life to be easy or fair.

Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and Beartown returns with an unforgettable novel “about people-about strength and tribal loyalty and what we unwittingly do when trying to show our boys how to be men” (Jojo Moyes).

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