"Sven, a 7-year-old Swedish boy, tries to kill someone for the first time in 1941. He doesn't succeed - not this time. Many decades later, Sven is a friendless and insignificant bureaucrat, an embodiment of respectable, well-ordered, rather dull postwar Swedish society. Every detail of his life is under his rigid control, until the day when some new people move into the apartment next door. Right to the last page, with its distinctive character, vivid dialogue and affecting mix of humour and poignancy, this novel refuses to deliver what is expected"