After the Fire

Reviews

This strange, beguiling book...gives closure to a substantial career without becoming maudlin or overly bleak. The waters around Welin’s island may freeze in the winter, but there is human warmth to be found in these pages, along with glimmers of hope and consolation... The bell may have tolled for one of Scandinavia’s finest writers, but his connection to those left behind is unbroken. A powerful reminder that [Mankell] was also a literary writer of considerable accomplishment... After the Fire is a life-enhancing novel... a suitable final curtain for a much-missed modern novelist It is very moving and rather beautiful The novel’s atmosphere is bleak and elegiac, suggesting that Mankell wrote it with his own impending death in mind After the Fire is full of regret, loneliness and the melancholy of growing old, but there is also hope and love. Expand reviews