My grandmother sends her regards and apologises, by Fredrik Backman

My grandmother sends her regards and apologises, by Fredrik Backman. Jonathan Ball Publishers SA. Cape Town; Johannesburg; South Africa, 2015. ISBN 9781444775846 / ISBN 978-1-4447-7584-6

My grandmother sends her regards and apologises is Fredrik Backman's story about life and death and the right to be different.

[...] She shouldn't take any notice of what those muppets think, says Granny. Because all the best people are different - look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal everyone would have them. Granny is seventy-seven years old, going on seventy-eight. She's not very good at it either. You can tell she's old because her face looks like newspaper stuffed into wet shoes, but no one ever accuses Granny of being grown-up for her age. 'Perky,' people sometimes say to Elsa's mum, looking either fairly worried or fairly angry as Mum sighs and asks how much she owes for the damages. Or when Granny's smoking at the hospital sets the fire alarm off and she starts ranting and raving about how 'everything has to be so bloody politically correct these days!' when the security guards make her extinguish her cigarette. Or that time she made a snowman in Britt-Marie and Kent's garden right under their balcony and dressed it up in grown-up clothes so it looked as if a person had fallen from the roof. Or that time those prim men wearing spectacles started ringing all the doorbells and wanted to talk about God and Jesus and heaven, and Granny stood on her balcony with her dressing gown flapping open, shooting at them with her paintball gun, and Britt-Marie couldn't quite decide if she was most annoyed about the paintball-gun thing or the not-wearing-anything-under-the-dressing-gown thing, but she reported both to the police just to be on the safe side. Those are the times, Elsa supposes, that people find Granny perky for her age. They also say that Granny is mad, but in actual fact she's a genius. It's just that she's a bit of a crackpot at the same time. She used to be a doctor, and she won prizes and journalists wrote articles about her and she went to all the most terrible places in the world when everyone else was getting out. She saved lives and fought evil everywhere on earth. As superheroes do. But one day someone decided she was too old to save lives, even if Elsa quite strongly suspects what they really meant by 'too old' was 'too crazy' Granny refers to this person as 'Society' and says it's only because everything has to be so bloody politically correct nowadays that she's no longer allowed to make incisions in people. And that it was really mainly about Society getting so bleeding fussy about the smoking ban in the operating theatres, and who could work under those sorts of conditions? So now she's mainly at home driving Britt-Marie and Mum round the bend. Britt-Marie lives one floor down from Granny. And really Britt-Marie also lives one floor down from Elsa's mum, because Elsa's mum lives next door to Elsa's granny. And Elsa obviously also lives next door to Granny, because Elsa lives with her mum. Except every other weekend, when she lives with Dad and Lisette. And of course George is also Granny's neighbour, because he lives with Mum. It's a bit all over the place. But anyway, to get back to the point: life-saving and driving people nuts are Granny's superpowers. Which perhaps makes her a bit of a dysfunctional superhero. Elsa knows this because she looked up 'dysfunctional' on Wikipedia. People of Granny's age describe Wikipedia as 'an encyclopaedia, but on the net!' Encyclopaedias are what Elsa describes as 'Wikipedia, but analogue.' [...]

This is an excerpt from My grandmother sends her regards and apologises, by Fredrik Backman.

Title: My grandmother sends her regards and apologises
Author: Fredrik Backman
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers SA
Cape Town; Johannesburg; South Africa, 2015
ISBN 9781444775846 / ISBN 978-1-4447-7584-6
Softcover, 14 x 22 cm, 342 pages