My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

Seven-year-old Elsa is precocious, "different," and often in trouble at school — but she has her granny, a seventy-seven-year-old force of nature who fires paintball guns from balconies, breaks every rule, and is Elsa's best and only real friend. Best of all, Granny is the teller of fairy tales set in the Land of Almost-Awake and the kingdom of Miamas, stories that have shielded Elsa from a lonely world.

When Granny dies of cancer, she leaves Elsa one last, greatest adventure: a treasure hunt of letters, each an apology to someone Granny wronged, to be delivered by Elsa herself. As Elsa carries the letters to the eccentric neighbors in her apartment building — a wurse, a monster, a woman with a fear of everything — she discovers that Granny's fantastical tales were built from the very real, often painful lives of the people all around her, and that the fairy tales were true in ways she never understood.

Warm, funny, and quietly devastating, Fredrik Backman's second novel (first published in Swedish in 2013) is a story about grief, imagination, and the way stories help us survive one another. Several of its characters, including Britt-Marie, go on to appear in Backman's later books.