Jonas lives a good life. Two kids, a successful painting business, married to the woman of his dreams, planning to finally buying a house. He’s the reliable sort, not comfortable in the spotlight, not a dinner speaker perhaps, but a beloved kids’ coach in both football and handball. But inside, Jonas is full of self hate, insecurities and feelings of inferiority. His white trash background, his dyslexia, his uninterested father form a hole inside him. And at the bottom of that hole is a nagging, black guilt that he’s never even begun to deal with. When Jonas wife decides to divorce him, he falls freely into an abyss of depression, anger and demons from the past.

In cross cut chapters we meet Jonas now, and in the childhood he never speaks of – when he was just another no good punk on the backyard of the welfare state, drinking, smoking weed, boffing, getting crappy grades and breaking into summer houses. And we get to know what really happened that summer night, many years ago, when Rebecka, the light in his life, died in a moped accident.

Kadefors has a keen eye for class especially. Like in her other books, this is a story of luggage, of falling out of the frame, of being unable to keep up. And Jonas’ inferiority visavi the other middle class people around him is as painful to read as it rings true. The same goes for his desperate, crude attempts at revenge. Unfortunately, Kadefors also has a tendency of writing stereotypes a lot of the time, and many secondary characters feel like flat clichés.

I listed to most of this during my long Fotrally, and as a book for such an occasion it worked well – substantial but not hard to follow, with a touch of simplification suitable for a tired head (It just so happens I listened to Kadefors during last year’s hike too!) ( )