After the Fire

Acclaimed Swedish crime novelist Mankell is perhaps best known for his series of Kurt Wallander novels, made into a TV series starring Kenneth Branagh. Concerning a mysterious fire set at the isolated home of disgraced 70-year-old Swedish physician Fredrik Welin, who lives alone on a small island off the coast, this new book—the final novel Mankell worked on before he died in 2015—is in many ways also a crime novel. But it is so much more: it's also a gripping, deeply moving philosophical meditation on life, loneliness, and old age. During the course of the book, Welin's estranged daughter, his only child, reestablishes communication with him and announces that she is pregnant. Welin also strikes up an unlikely friendship with a female reporter who interviews him for the local newspaper about the fire. These unlikely developments coax Welin, who at the beginning of the novel has essentially given up and is waiting to die, back into the world of living and loving. Mankell handles this all with great compassion, humor, and humility.