Osebol: Voices from a Swedish Village

"It’s not! You have to read it very carefully. It deals with a tiny village in Sweden which has about 40 inhabitants left. The writer has basically interviewed all of them and, using those interviews, told the story of a particular place over time. So you get the minutiae of the life of a village, against the backdrop of the 20th and 21st century and changes that are taking place. It reads like poetry, but she’s simply taken the words of the local inhabitants and presented them in a different form. This book makes you work because it’s not immediately apparent what’s going on. Then you begin to work it out, who is speaking, when they’re speaking, what they’ve done in life, what their age is, what their role is. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a completely original insight into the life of a tiny place which, again, throws up universal themes. Once I got into it, it’s rather an exciting book to read, because it’s so original, but so resonant because it deals with our lives too. So much of it speaks to what anyone in any community goes through and observes: frustrations and anxieties and emotions and passions and loves and hates. It’s an amazing book. It wasn’t for me. I spend my life sitting in courtrooms listening to the minutiae of things, so I’m fascinated by those. I’m also fascinated by the act of telling them. What is so powerful about this book is that the manner of the telling of the stories is just so original, it’s so different from any other book I’ve come across. So yes, you’re in a single village in Sweden but that’s a lens into a bigger picture about the human condition."