The Deal of a Lifetime

Praise for Beartown

Surrounded by impenetrable forests, it recreates the stifling atmosphere of a dying community. This is a mature, compassionate novel.

Sunday Times

A story about families, about friendship and loyalty, inequality, female vulnerability, male back-slapping, and parenthood ... No person's story is too little to be told, Backman includes them all. A novel with a big heart

Jönköpings-Posten, Sweden

A kind of problem play that moves extremely skilfully near the melodramatic without derailing. Its originality is substantial and the book credibly conveys the dual faces of everyday life. An impressive novel, like no other

BTJ, Sweden

Friday Night Lights for Swedes

O Magazine

As popular Swedish exports go, Backman is up there with ABBA and Stieg Larsson.

The New York Times Book Review

Backman is a masterful writer, his characters familiar yet distinct, flawed yet heroic. . . There are scenes that bring tears, scenes of gut-wrenching despair, and moments of sly humor. . .Like Friday Night Lights, this is about more than youth sports; it's part coming-of-age novel, part study of moral failure, and finally a chronicle of groupthink in which an unlikely hero steps forward to save more than one person from self-destruction. A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman's latest will resonate a long time.

Kirkus Reviews

This (dimensionally) tiny book comes packed with huge emotion. Readers will speed through it in under two hours, then spend the rest of the day - at least - pondering the astonishing ideas it unleashes. The Deal of a Lifetime quite literally will grab you from the start and set you off in a host of incredible directions. Fredrik Backman has a wonderful ability to reach deep inside his readers, pull out feelings they didn't know they had, and set their minds spinning. What a blockbuster!

The Book Reporter, US

[This] book is short but every word counts and that'll hit you square in the heart. . . . You may shed tears over this book. You may need to savor it a second time, to feel its words again. However you read it, The Deal of a Lifetime is an experience you'll never trade.

Rushville Republican, US

The Deal of a Lifetime strikes straight at the heart and hits you

Deccan Chronicle, India