Beartown

Beartown is a small hockey town — a town whose identity, whose economy, whose sense of its own worth is built around its junior hockey team and the possibility that this year, finally, they will win the national championship. When a young woman accuses the team’s star player of rape, the town divides along lines of loyalty, silence, and complicity that reveal exactly what a community’s values actually are when they are tested against its interests. Fredrik Backman’s most ambitious novel — a book about small-town sports culture that is really about how communities decide who matters and who doesn’t.

Essential Backman — and a novel of genuine moral weight and genuine emotional power. Published by Michael Joseph.