The scene: an apartment showing, the day before New Year’s. The apartment is filled with people, and then enters one more: a masked individual wielding a gun, panicked. They’ve just tried to rob a bank, only the bank is a cashless bank, and in an attempt to evade the police after their failed crime, they’ve found their way into this apartment where the only thing left to do is take hostages — which, among this group of neurotics, will go about as well as herding cats. By day’s end, the hostages are free, but the hostage-taker is missing….and the cops are left wondering if one of the hostages isn’t lying. This isn’t just a story about a bank robbery gone awry, though; there’s also a bridge that connects several lives within the room and without it, stories of relationships gone awry and hopes dashed and people muddling along as best they can. It’s a delightfully messy mix of absurdism and pathos, with one of those carousel-esque narratives that can be frustrating and confusing, depending on the reader, but here serves the story well, because everyone is kind of confused, especially the cop and the not-actually-a-robber, and it’s not until the end that anything really makes sense. And yet, at the same time, the characters and authors speak truth to the reader from the very beginning, lighting bolts of insight erupting from a chaotic and cloudy setup. Like many people I know, this book is confusing, captivating, maddening, and beautiful all at once — not for its main story, but for the way that main story encompasses several others, like a symphony of different movements, shades and preview of the sister movements making themselves known throughout. If you like straightforward narrative, Backman’s approach will frustrate — think Catch-22 — but it’s a story that takes readers on a whiplash ride, banging around from deep sorrow to unexpected mirth with the turn of a page. I don’t know who stuck a copy in our library bookstore, but I’m glad they did. Both of the works I’ve tried by Backman have been wonderful.