The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

Jonas Jonasson's 2009 Swedish debut novel (English translation 2012) opens on the day Allan Karlsson turns 100: rather than sit through the birthday party his nursing home has planned, he climbs out his ground-floor window in his slippers and walks off. What follows is a farcical present-day chase, as Allan opportunistically makes off with a suitcase of drug money at a bus station and is pursued across Sweden by the criminals it belongs to, picking up a ragtag group of accomplices — and, eventually, an elephant — along the way.

Interleaved with the chase are flashbacks to Allan's outlandish life story: an explosives expert by trade, he is swept into the Spanish Civil War, recruited into the Manhattan Project, and entangled in Cold War espionage on several continents, crossing paths along the way with Franco, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill, and repeatedly — always by accident — nudging the century's history in a different direction.

The novel became Sweden's bestselling book of 2010 and has sold millions of copies worldwide; it was adapted into a 2013 Swedish film and followed by a 2018 sequel. It is best known for its absurdist comic tone and its sly satire of 20th-century politics and the men who ran it.