They didn’t fit in at the Air Force bases they were raised on or the strict convent boarding school they were sent to. An open-house viewing turned hostage situation doesn’t sound like it would be the perfect setting for a comedy, but Backman’s novel is nothing if not laugh-out-loud funny.

You may try to compare a feeling or a situation to the most absurd image and then put it in your character’s dialogue. Although it was written partly out of the pain of discovering his first wife’s adultery and ends on “the biggest battlefield in the history of the world”, it is continuously amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny. When 84-year-old Nikolai shacks up with Valentina, a much, much younger woman from Ukraine, his daughters Nadezhda and Vera – who have been estranged for some time – are dragged back together to work out how they can force this interloper out of their lives.It should be enjoyed in private, where you can laugh, scream and dribble at your pleasure, without fear of being arrested. jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":728,"bigHeight":546,"licensing":"