Not counting the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, A Man Called Ove is the best selling book by a Swedish author in decades, maybe ever.
 It doesn't break any new ground and it reminded me very much of Anny Tyler's much better 1985 The Accidental Tourist. Both are about middle aged men who've lost a loved one and shut down their emotions because of it until both good and bad aspects of life around them thaws them out and brings them back into the world of the fully living. It gets a little too heart warming for my usual taste and the stray cat he takes in behaves so unrealistically that it borders on magical realism, which I dislike.
 It is, as Publishers Weekly's blurb on the back cover of the edition I read says, a "crowd-pleaser." At times these days, that's all I'm looking for, personally. It is not, as Kirkus Reviews said, "Hysterically funny," though I can think of maybe two books in my life that have made me laugh out loud.