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Narrated by Marin Ireland
Fredrik BackmanUnabridged — 14 hours, 17 minutes
Narrated by Marin Ireland
Fredrik BackmanUnabridged — 14 hours, 17 minutes
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From the "Dickens of our age" (Green Valley News) and New York Times bestselling author of Beartown and A Man Called Ove, a heart-wrenching story of how loyalty, friendship, and love carry a town through its darkest days.
After everything that the citizens of Beartown have gone through, they are struck yet another blow when they learn that their beloved local hockey team will soon be disbanded. What makes it worse is the obvious satisfaction that all the former Beartown players, who now play for a rival team in Hed, take in that fact. Amidst the mounting tension between the two rivals, a surprising newcomer is handpicked to be Beartown's new hockey coach.
Soon a new team starts to take shape around Amat, the fastest player you'll ever see; Benji, the crazed lone wolf; and Vidar, a born-to-be-bad troublemaker. Bringing this team together is a challenge as old bonds are broken, new ones are formed, and the enmity with Hed grows more and more acute.
As the big match approaches, the not-so-innocent pranks and incidents between the communities pile up, and hatred grows deeper. When the last game is finally played, one of Beartown's key players will be dead, and residents of both towns are forced to wonder whether, after all they've been through, the game they love can ever return to something simple and innocent.
Us Against You is a declaration of love for all the big and small, bright and dark stories that form and color our communities. Compelling and heartbreaking, it's a roller-coaster ride of emotions with Fredrik "Backman's pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature" (Shelf Awareness).
PRAISE FOR US AGAINST YOU
“What you get in a Fredrik Backman work is wonderful writing and brilliant insights into things that truly matter—right vs. wrong, fear vs. courage, love vs. hate, the importance and limits of friendship and loyalty, and more. Fredrik Backman is one of the world’s best and most interesting novelists. He is a giant among the world’s great novelists—and this literary giant is still growing.
"Deftly explores recovery and rebirth."
"[Backman] creates an astute emotional world much bigger than a small Swedish town...A novel you can sink into."
If Alexander McCall Smith’s and Maeve Binchy’s novels had a love child, the result would be the work of Swedish writer Fredrik Backman...With his wry acceptance of foible and failure, Backman combines a singular style with a large and compassionate perspective for his characters...[His] novels have wide appeal, and for good reason. Us Against You takes a lyrical look at how a community heals, how families recover and how individuals grow.
"Backman is the Dickens of our age, and though you'll cry, your heart is safe in his hands."
"A light hearted, deeply moving novel about a grumpy but loveable curmudgeon who finds his solitary world."
Mr. Backman cements his standing as a writer of astonishing depth and proves that he also has very broad range plus the remarkable ability to make you understand the feelings of each of a dozen different characters. . . . The story is fully packed with wise insights into the human experience causing characters and readers to ponder life’s great question of who we are, what we hope to be and how we should lead our lives.
"[Backman] creates an astute emotional world much bigger than a small Swedish town...A novel you can sink into."
★ 09/01/2018
Everything that happens in this resonating sequel to Beartown is related in the first two pages. But listeners will want to hear every word to discover how the events play out—better yet, they'll want to absorb every echoing nuance brilliantly embodied by Marin Ireland, who returns to this remote town as it desperately attempts to mend from a vicious rape that destroyed the hockey team. "When we found out the truth, we fell apart, taking the town with us… This is the story of what happened afterward." A new coach takes charge, a team is reassembled. Fighting for ultimate control is a Svengali-like politician whose rise and fall both prove inevitable. Through the muck of corruption, greed, rivalry, blame, and so much hate, Beartown will need to remember that hockey "is a simple game, if you strip away all the crap surrounding it… Everyone gets a stick. Two nets. Two teams. Us against you."VERDICT With Beartown's previous success, similar victory is all but guaranteed for Us; Ireland's unfaltering enhancement will have audiences clamoring for the audio option. ["Even more potential for book group discussion as Backman explores…what makes us all tick": LJ 4/15/18 starred review of the Atria hc.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
★ 04/15/2018
This follow-up to Beartown is about hockey—and everything else. Here the residents of Backman's isolated Swedish town, with some new additions, resume their lives where they left off at the end of the earlier novel. Since the history of each individual is examined and outlined in turn, new readers can catch up quickly. Some minor incidents in the first book play out in this one, exploding the little mines buried in Beartown. With a penchant for foreshadowing and then foiling readers' expectations, Backman widens the vision of the setting, encompassing the rival town of Hed and its own hockey team, made up of former players from Beartown's soon-to-be disbanded league. It's just a game, two teams, sticks and pucks. Us against you, doesn't that say it all? VERDICT There is even more potential for book group discussion here as Backman explores violence, political maneuvering, communities, feminism, sexuality, criminality, the role of sports in society, and what makes us all tick. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.]—Mary K. Bird-Guilliams, Chicago
You’d be forgiven for comparing narrator Marin Ireland and author Fredrik Backman to the great hockey tandem Mark Messier and Wayne Gretzky. Like Messier and Gretzky, Ireland and Backman are quite the formidable pair (as was discovered when Ireland narrated Backman’s bestseller, BEARTOWN.) Backman’s new novel picks up where BEARTOWN left off, and Ireland doesn’t miss a beat (or open net, if you’d prefer a sports analogy). She once again gives an unforced, nuanced take on characters that include adolescents struggling to find their way, a crusty old barkeep, a power-hungry politician, and a married couple hoping to reconnect after terrible tragedies. If you enjoyed Ireland’s work in BEARTOWN, you will not be disappointed hearing her read US AGAINST YOU. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
2018-05-01
Shockwaves from the incidents in Beartown (2017) shake an economically depressed hockey town in this latest from the author of A Man Called Ove.Swedish novelist Backman loves an aphorism and is very good at them; evident in all his novels is an apparent ability to state a truth about humanity with breathtaking elegance. Often, he uses this same elegance to slyly misdirect his readers. Sometimes he overreaches and words that sound pretty together don't hold up to scrutiny. This novel has a plethora of all three. Grim in tone, it features an overstocked cast of characters, all of whom are struggling for self-definition. Each has previously been shaped by the local hockey club, but that club is now being defunded and resources reallocated to the club of a rival town. Some Beartown athletes follow, some don't. Lines are drawn in the sand. Several characters get played by a Machiavellian local politician who gets the club reinstated. Nearly all make poor decisions, rolling the town closer and closer to tragedy. Backman wants readers to know that things are complicated. Sure, many of Beartown's residents are bigots and bullies. But some are generous and selfless. Actually, the bigots and bullies are also generous and selfless, in certain circumstances. And Lord knows they've all had a rough time of it. The important thing to remember is that hockey is pure. Except when it inspires violence. This is an interesting tactic for a novel in our cultural moment of sensitivity, and it can feel cumbersome. "When guys are scared of the dark they're scared of ghosts and monsters," he writes. "But when girls are scared of the dark they're scared of guys." Margaret Atwood said it better and with more authority decades ago.Backman plays the story for both cynicism and hope, and his skill makes both hard, but not impossible, to resist.
| BN ID: | 2940171035075 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2018 |
| Series: | Beartown , #2 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 670,327 |
Chapter 1: It’s Going to Be Someone’s Fault 1 It’s Going to Be Someone’s Fault
Have you ever seen a town fall? Ours did. We’ll end up saying that violence came to Beartown this summer, but that will be a lie; the violence was already here. Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else.
We’re a small community in the forest; people say that no roads lead here, just past. The economy coughs every time it takes a deep breath; the factory cuts its workforce each year like a child that thinks no one will notice the cake in the fridge getting smaller if you take a little bit from each side. If you lay a current map of the town over an old one, the main shopping street and the little strip known as “the center” seem to shrink like bacon in a hot pan. We have an ice rink but not much else. But on the other hand, as people usually say here: What the hell else do you need?
People driving through say that Beartown doesn’t live for anything but hockey, and some days they may be right. Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else. We’re not mad, we’re not greedy; say what you like about Beartown, but the people here are tough and hardworking. So we built a hockey team that was like us, that we could be proud of, because we weren’t like you. When people from the big cities thought something seemed too hard, we just grinned and said, “It’s supposed to be hard.” Growing up here wasn’t easy; that’s why we did it, not you. We stood tall, no matter the weather. But then something happened, and we fell.
There’s a story about us before this one, and we’re always going to carry the guilt of that. Sometimes good people do terrible things in the belief that they’re trying to protect what they love. A boy, the star of the hockey team, raped a girl. And we lost our way. A community is the sum of its choices, and when two of our children said different things, we believed him. Because that was easier, because if the girl was lying our lives could carry on as usual. When we found out the truth, we fell apart, taking the town with us. It’s easy to say that we should have done everything differently, but perhaps you wouldn’t have acted differently, either. If you’d been afraid, if you’d been forced to pick a side, if you’d known what you had to sacrifice. Perhaps you wouldn’t be as brave as you think. Perhaps you’re not as different from us as you hope.
This is the story of what happened afterward, from one summer to the following winter. It is about Beartown and the neighboring town of Hed, and how the rivalry between two hockey teams can grow into a mad struggle for money and power and survival. It is a story about hockey rinks and all the hearts that beat around them, about people and sports and how they sometimes take turns carrying each other. About us, people who dream and fight. Some of us will fall in love, others will be crushed; we’ll have good days and some very bad days. This town will rejoice, but it will also start to burn. There’s going to be a terrible bang.
Some girls will make us proud; some boys will make us great. Young men dressed in different colors will fight to the death in a dark forest. A car will drive too fast through the night. We will say that it was a traffic accident, but accidents happen by chance, and we will know that we could have prevented this one. This one will be someone’s fault.
People we love will die. We will bury our children beneath our most beautiful trees.
Weddings (and murder!) take center stage this month, along with intriguing family dramas starring modern Muslim Americans and Native Americans. Fates and Furies author Lauren Groff is back with a collection of short stories, and sequels to I Don’t Know How She Does It, Beartown, and The Devil Wears Prada bridge the gap between Lowcountry beach reads and juicy, heart-clenching tales […]
