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Bloody Awful in Different Ways with Andrev Walden, in conversation with Claire Fuller
7 October @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Mr B’s is delighted to welcome acclaimed Swedish writer and journalist, Andrev Walden, to chat about his debut novel, Bloody Awful in Different Ways.
Already a phenomenal international bestseller with a film adaptation in the works, Bloody Awful in Different Ways won the the 2023 August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award. This vivid and joyful novel follows a young boy who has seven fathers in seven years, and has already been loved by our bookseller Sue, who describes it as ‘poignant, funny and bloody brilliant in every way.’
Andrev Walden is an acclaimed Swedish journalist and columnist who has worked for Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. In 2017, he became the first columnist to be nominated for the Swedish Grand Prize for journalism, praised for his ability to ‘find the everyday drama in the big questions’, and to make us ‘laugh and see the world, the family and ourselves in a new and slightly wiser light’. He lives in Stockholm.
Andrev will be in conversation with Claire Fuller, award-winning author of five novels including Unsettled Ground, Our Endless Numbered Days, and most recently, The Memory of Animals.
About the book:
I’m fizzing. I love not being his son. Yes.
I can feel it in my whole body. A great thrill – as if an adventure has begun. As if I’m the boy in a book about a boy who finds out his dad is the king of a magical and distant land.
Christmas, 1983. In the aftermath of yet another furious argument, seven-year-old Andrev’s mother lets him in on a secret: his father is, in fact, not his father. And so begins a new kind of childhood, in which fathers come and go, arriving in red Volvos and sweeping his mother off her feet.
Fathers can be magicians or murderers, artists or thieves, and, like growing pains, or the weather, they appear uninvited and leave without warning. Fathers are drawn to his mother like moths to a flame – but even she can’t control how they behave. Vivid and joyful, raw and tender, Bloody Awful in Different Ways is a novel about growing up in the chaos of social change; about how love begins and ends; and above all, about men.
Because after all, you learn an awful lot about this strange species when you have seven fathers in seven years.
‘Pure joyous storytelling on every page … A little treasure of a book’ Fredrick Backman
‘A delight from start to finish’ Jennie Godfrey
