The Unremarkable Man

Magnus Lindström is forty-four years old. He has worked at the same hardware shop on Odengatan for nineteen years, catches the same pendeltåg every morning, has been with the same woman for twelve. He is, by every honest measure he has ever made, the unremarkable man in any room he enters.

Then, on a Tuesday in October, his girlfriend Annika packs three boxes and the painting and the armchair, and is gone.

What follows is a year - the autumn dark, a long winter, a walk across the length of Stockholm in April, a chair Magnus has been building in his basement for seven years. Phone calls from old friends in the small hours. Sunday lunches in Uppsala with parents who speak rarely and mean a great deal by it. A woman with dust under her fingernails who comes into the shop, three times, looking for hinges.

And, underneath all of it, a slow accumulating evidence - held off, deflected, half-heard for as long as he can manage - that the people he loves have been seeing him, all the years of his adult life, in a way he has never seen himself.

The Unremarkable Man is a quiet, observational, melancholic, and warm novel set across one year in Stockholm. It trusts its reader. The reader sees what Magnus does not, and is asked to wait. The pleasure is in the slow, exact arrival.