Let's Hope for the Best

"Carolina's sentences are spare and simple, and they reveal a portrait of anxiety and control, grief and abandonment, that lasts for many painful years. "How can I hold onto you when you're not here?" she asks. "How can I move on without the approval of the people in our life who matter the most to me? The equation seems unsolvable."A moving and tender work of autofiction that depicts the obsessive interiority of grief."—Kirkus

"Confessional and shockingly honest about desire, love, and loss...utterly compulsive."—Marian Keyes, bestselling author of The Break and The Woman Who Stole My Life

"It's the most compelling book I've read in years."—Times

"Intense and relentlessly navel-gazing, this debut by 40-year-old Swedish writer Carolina Setterwall may be billed as an autobiographical novel but is quite simply one of the best bereavement memoirs I've read... It's impossible not to draw comparisons with Karl Ove Knausgaard, who must surely have been an inspiration. But there is a unique voice here, a style of disclosure all her own, incidentally beautifully translated. It's an emotional battering ram, I thought, and I absolutely loved it."—Evening Standard

"This Scandinavian bestseller was based on tragic real events, so it's not surprising that every spare, controlled sentence has the ring of truth. (...) This painfully clear-sighted, unsentimental novel is in two alternating parts; one detailing the years leading up to Aksel's death, the other everything that comes after. It's about grief in all its raw messiness, but it's also (as how could it not be?) about time ... Setterwall's refusal to impose twists or false neatness is at first admirable then, as a fragile new love begins to blossom for Carolina, gripping."—Daily Mail