Fredrik Backman

From the New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, Anxious People, and My Friends, a profoundly moving novella about an elderly man’s struggle to hold on to his happy memories, face his regrets, and help his son and grandson learn to say goodbye to him.

“We know so little about how the brain works. It’s like a fading star right now, do you remember what I taught you about that?”

“When a star fades, it takes a long time for us to realize, as long as it takes for the last of its light to reach earth.”

Grandpa and Noah are sitting on a bench in a round square that keeps getting smaller every day. Noah isn’t sure how they got there or how to get home. The square is strange but also familiar, full of the stuff that has made up their lives—Grandpa’s work desk, the stuffed dragon that Grandpa once gave to Noah, the sweet-smelling hyacinths that Grandma loved to grow in her garden.

As they wait together on the bench, they tell jokes and discuss their shared love of mathematics. Grandpa recalls what it was like to fall in love with his wife, what it was like to lose her. She’s as real to him now as the first day he met her, but he dreads the day when he won’t remember her at all, much less the extraordinarily ordinary life they lived. (Or was it ordinarily extraordinary?)

Sometimes Grandpa finds himself sitting on the bench next to Ted, Noah’s father. Ted, who never liked math, prefers writing and playing guitar, and has waited his entire life for his father to have time for him, to accept him. But in their love of Noah, they have found a common bond.

Grandpa, Grandma, Ted, and Noah all meet here, in this peculiar space that is growing dim and getting more confusing all the time. And here is where they will learn to say goodbye, the scent of hyacinths in the air, nothing to fear.