Britt-Marie Was Here

Britt-Marie Was Here is Fredrik Backman's novel about a woman starting over. After forty years of marriage, the fastidious, socially awkward Britt-Marie leaves her cheating husband Kent and takes the only job she can find: caretaker of a recreation center about to be demolished in Borg, a nearly-abandoned Swedish town that people drive through but never stay in.

Britt-Marie soon finds herself pressed into coaching Borg's chaotic children's soccer team, and drawn — against every instinct — into the daily lives of the town's misfits, drunks, and layabouts, including the kindly policeman Sven. What begins as a story about a rigid, deeply particular woman finding herself somewhere she never meant to stay becomes a warm, funny meditation on community, second chances, and what it means to finally be seen.

Britt-Marie first appeared as a supporting character in Backman's earlier novel My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry; this book stands on its own but gives her story the center stage.