After the Fire by Henning Mankell

Seventy-year-old Fredrik Welin lives on one of the islands making up an archipelago off the coast of Sweden. He lives alone in a big old house built by his grandfather. His wife has died. He  has a daughter, Louise, but she's a traveller and rarely divulges her whereabouts, or indeed any facts about her life, to her father.

Fredrik is woken late one night by a searing light - his house is on fire. He only has time to save himself and nothing else. By the next day the house is burnt right down to the ground.

Over the next few months we learn more about Fredrik - his life on the island, his daughter and her secrets, his relationship with a journalist, and also about Jansson the postman, who not only delivers all the mail by boat to the islanders, but reads all of it too. We also follow the investigation into the fire, as suspicions arise as to who or what caused it to start.

In 2015 Henning Mankell died from cancer. This was his final piece of work. He was a very popular author of Swedish crime fiction, most notably his character Kurt Wallander, played brilliantly by Kenneth Branagh in the English-language tv drama series. 'After the Fire' dwells on loneliness, loss and death. When I was reading the book, I was picturing everything in black and white, just like the cover, as nothing in the book seemed to evoke colour or happiness. I don't know whether this is because of Mankell's state of mind while writing the book, or whether all his crime books have a similar feeling. He also draws on incidents from his own life to include in the book, one of them being when Fredrik travels to Paris and memories rush back to him of when he was there as a young man and arrested during the student uprising in 1968. Mankell himself lived in Paris starting out as a writer, and himself took part in the student uprising. 

Even though the book is quite long, and many chapters are about the minutiae of Fredrik's life - his shopping, his daily ablutions, his trips and falls, his musings on life and death - it's never dull or boring, it subtly pulls you into the story of a lonely man living in a lonely environment.