India, Dec. 19 -- I read Anxious People in January 2025, on a day where allergies left me feeling like a lone soldier stuck in a high battlement facing an entire troop. After being unable to focus on the physical book thanks to the constant tears and sneezes, I switched over to the audio book and finished it in a single day. Almost a year later, this is the book I still catch myself thinking about quite often.

Describing Fredrik Backman's Anxious People to someone who hasn't read it would be quite straight-forward: A group of people in an open apartment-viewing in a small town in Sweden get taken hostage when a bank robber fleeing the police enters the apartment. As the law enforcement tries to make sense of the situation, the hostages r...