After the Fire

By: Henning Mankell, Marlaine Delargy - translator

Narrated by: Sean Barrett

Random House presents the audiobook edition of After the Fire by Henning Mankell, read by Sean Barrett.

Fredrik Welin is a seventy-year-old retired doctor. Years ago he retreated to the Swedish archipelago, where he lives alone on an island. He swims in the sea every day, cutting a hole in the ice if necessary. He lives a quiet life. Until he wakes up one night to find his house on fire.

Fredrik escapes just in time, wearing two left-footed wellies, as neighbouring islanders arrive to help douse the flames. All that remains in the morning is a stinking ruin and evidence of arson. The house that has been in his family for generations and all his worldly belongings are gone. He cannot think who would do such a thing, or why. Without a suspect, the police begin to think he started the fire himself.

Tackling love, loss and loneliness, After the Fire is Henning Mankell’s compelling last novel.

Critic 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. (Ian Rankin)

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 (Barry Forshaw)

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 (Joan Smith)

After the Fire is full of regret, loneliness and the melancholy of growing old, but there is also hope and love.

This posthumous translation by Marlaine Delargy, captivating in its delicately wry tone, echoes the seemingly flat reportage of Mankell’s prose: it somehow grabs you and won’t let you go… Mankell’s last novel is an elegiac meditation on old age and impending death… The extraordinary gift of Mankell’s bleak narrative is to make the last months of the life of his depressed and, frankly, unsympathetic and solitary anti-hero, both comforting and even inspiring. It is Mankell’s own candle in the lightless void (Marina Vaizey)

The huge number of readers who are devoted to the work of the late Henning Mankell will find in this, his last novel, all the characteristics they value: the observant descriptions of the minutiae of daily life, the gentle melancholy, the careful analysis of relationships (especially between fathers and daughters) and, above all, the inevitability of loneliness and loss

This profoundly gloomy yet ultimately hopeful novel – the last from the late grand master of Scandinavian noir – revolves around discovering who could have been responsible for this senseless crime (John Williams)

This final novel from Mankell (the Kurt Wallander series), posthumously published in a stunning English translation, questions what happens to a person who has lost everything—and who considers himself too old to rebuild... It’s a skillfully told, exquisitely structured story filled with sharp insights into human nature and unflinching examinations of the complex relationships to which people bind themselves in order to feel a little bit less alone.

A bracing look at a twilight year in the life of an old man who, when confronted daily by perfectly good reasons for giving up altogether, doesn’t so much rise above as plow stoically through them.

Mankell + Barrett = Genius

I think you may have to be approaching "Fredrik's" age to really appreciate this book. Fredrik is not a particularly nice person, He has lived his (probably comfortable) life according to his desires, had a professional calamity, paid the price. Reclusive and alone, he has ended up as the sum of that life long equation, and, in the face of the disaster of the fire and his efforts to understand what has happened and is happening finds that he is, largely, irrelevant. Everything happens to him, and around him, nothing is about him anymore, he is (despite his clumsy, bitter efforts) peripheral to everyone else in his life. Barrett's masterly interpretation amplifies all this. At times Barrett's reading is almost too sad, at other dialogue moments you just hope that "Fredrik" will not respond using Mankells words and Barretts tone of voice...but he does, and digs a deeper hole for himself. Enough said...however those of us of a certain age and enough self awareness might listen to this and take it as a warning.

watch paint dry, it's more fun than this!

boring, boring, boring. emotionally stunted characters who achieve nothing, don't change and who's lives are dull.