Fredrik Backman - My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You Shes Sorry

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2015 by Fredrik Backman

Translation 2014 by Henning Koch

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Books hardcover edition June 2015.

Previously published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton.

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Jacket design by Alan Dingman

Jacket photographs by Getty Images

Author photograph by Henric Lindsten

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Backman, Fredrik, 1981

[Min mormor hlsar och sager frlt. English]

My grandmother asked me to tell you shes sorry : a novel / by Fredrik Backman ; translated from the Swedish by Henning Koch.

pages cm

1. Originally published as: Min mormor hlsar och sager frlt. Stockholm : Mnpocket, 2013. 2. Grandparent and childFiction. 3. GrandmothersDeathFiction. 4. GirlsFiction. 5. IndividualityFiction. 6. Fairy talesFiction. 7. Life change eventsFiction. I. Koch, Henning, 1962 translator. II. Title.

PT9877.12.A32M5613 2015

839.73'8dc23

2015000829

ISBN 978-1-5011-1506-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-1508-0 (ebook)

To the monkey and the frog. For an eternity of ten thousand tales.

E very seven-year-old deserves a superhero. Thats just how it is.

Anyone who doesnt agree needs their head examined.

Thats what Elsas granny says, at least.

Elsa is seven, going on eight. She knows she isnt especially good at being seven. She knows shes different. Her headmaster says she needs to fall into line in order to achieve a better fit with her peers. Other adults describe her as very grown-up for her age. Elsa knows this is just another way of saying massively annoying for her age, because they only tend to say this when she corrects them for mispronouncing dj vu or not being able to tell the difference between me and I at the end of a sentence. Smart-asses usually cant, hence the grown-up for her age comment, generally said with a strained smile at her parents. As if she has a mental impairment, as if Elsa has shown them up by not being totally thick just because shes seven. And thats why she doesnt have any friends except Granny. Because all the other seven-year-olds in her school are as idiotic as seven-year-olds tend to be, but Elsa is different.

She shouldnt take any notice of what those muppets think, says Granny. Because all the best people are differentlook at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them.

Granny is seventy-seven years old, going on seventy-eight. Shes not very good at it either. You can tell shes old because her face looks like newspaper stuffed into wet shoes, but no one ever accuses Granny of being grown-up for her age. Perky, people sometimes say to Elsas mum, looking either fairly worried or fairly angry as Mum sighs and asks how much she owes for the damages. Or when Grannys smoking at the hospital sets the fire alarm off and she starts ranting and raving about how everything has to be so bloody politically correct these days! when the security guards make her extinguish her cigarette. Or that time she made a snowman in Britt-Marie and Kents garden right under their balcony and dressed it up in grown-up clothes so it looked as if a person had fallen from the roof. Or that time those prim men wearing spectacles started ringing all the doorbells and wanted to talk about God and Jesus and heaven, and Granny stood on her balcony with her dressing gown flapping open, shooting at them with her paintball gun, and Britt-Marie couldnt quite decide if she was most annoyed about the paintball-gun thing or the not-wearing-anything-under-the-dressing-gown thing, but she reported both to the police just to be on the safe side.

Those are the times, Elsa supposes, that people find Granny perky for her age.

They also say that Granny is mad, but in actual fact shes a genius. Its just that shes a bit of a crackpot at the same time. She used to be a doctor, and she won prizes and journalists wrote articles about her and she went to all the most terrible places in the world when everyone else was getting out. She saved lives and fought evil everywhere on earth. As superheroes do.

But one day someone decided she was too old to save lives, even if Elsa quite strongly suspects what they really meant by too old was too crazy. Granny refers to this person as Society and says its only because everything has to be so bloody politically correct nowadays that shes no longer allowed to make incisions in people. And that it was really mainly about Society getting so bleeding fussy about the smoking ban in the operating theaters, and who could work under those sorts of conditions?

So now shes mainly at home driving Britt-Marie and Mum around the bend. Britt-Marie is Grannys neighbor, Mum is Elsas mum. And really Britt-Marie is also Elsas mums neighbor because Elsas mum lives next door to Elsas granny. And Elsa obviously also lives next door to Granny, because Elsa lives with her mum. Except every other weekend, when she lives with Dad and Lisette. And of course George is also Grannys neighbor, because he lives with Mum. Its a bit all over the place.

But anyway, to get back to the point: lifesaving and driving people nuts are Grannys superpowers. Which perhaps makes her a bit of a dysfunctional superhero. Elsa knows this because she looked up dysfunctional on Wikipedia . People of Grannys age describe Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, but on the net! Encyclopedias are what Elsa describes as Wikipedia , but analog. Elsa has checked dysfunctional in both places and it means that something is not quite functioning as its supposed to. Which is one of Elsas favorite things about her granny.