Beartown
Fredrik Backman, 2016
Contemporary fiction Graphic novels & humourYoung adult
A small forest town pins its future on a junior hockey team, and the people inside it must decide what they owe the place that made them.
Feels like tenderness, dread and hope. About love.
A page from the book
How a community talks itself into a war, one reasonable step at a time.
Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that’s easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy. Fredrik Backman.Beartown was published in Sweden in 2016 as Björnstad; the title is the town's name, and the novel became a Swedish TV series in 2020.
Books that feel like this
More by Fredrik Backman
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman, 2012
A grumpy Swedish man with strict rules and a Saab finds his orderly life interrupted by the messy neighbours next door. Funny, tender and sometimes bleak.
My Friends
Fredrik Backman, 2025
A teenage vandal, a perfect plan, and a painting worth more than a life—Backman’s funniest, most tender voice yet.
Anxious People
Fredrik Backman, 2019
A failed bank robber takes a roomful of apartment-viewing strangers hostage, and the police try to work out who is really trapped.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Beartown like?
- Feels like tenderness, dread and hope. About love.
- What should I read after Beartown?
- If you liked Beartown, try Archer's Voice (Mia Sheridan), It Starts with Us (Colleen Hoover) and The Hero of Ages (Brandon Sanderson).
A taste of the feed
The parts of yourself you'd rather hide are not disqualified from love.
I knew I loved her – fiercely and with every part of my heart, even the broken parts, even the parts that felt unworthy and without value. And maybe those parts most of all.
Archer's Voice · Mia Sheridan
How to hold a love that ended without filing it under failure.
Maybe the idea of love ending being a negative thing is simply a matter of perspective. Because to me, the idea that a love came to an end means that, at some point, there was love that existed. And there was a time in my life, before you, when I was completely untouched by it.
It Starts with Us · Colleen Hoover
The most unsettling thing about power is when it is polite.
The sword jerked from Druffel’s hand, yanked into the air by an unseen force. The stranger snatched the weapon as it passed his head. He flipped the sword around, inspecting it. “Good steel,” he said, nodding. “I’m impressed. How many of your soldiers are this well equipped?” He flipped the weapon in his hand, handing it back toward Druffel hilt-first.
The Hero of Ages · Brandon Sanderson
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