Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown

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I would say that this is the best book about Sweden I've ever read, but that sounds like faint praise — let's say that this is the best book about Sweden I can imagine. Andrew Brown went there in the 1970s, with his Swedish girlfriend, and stayed for years. He describes the cold exceptionally well, and the lakes, and the recent austerity that still lived in everybody's memory — the melancholy is palpable. His accounts of fishing are superb. And I love the way he writes about the Swedish Premier, Olof Palme.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Sweden was an affluent, egalitarian country envied around the world. Refugees were welcomed, even misfit young Englishmen could find a place there. Andrew Brown spent part of his childhood in Sweden during the 1960s. In the 1970s he married a Swedish woman and worked in a timber mill raising their small son. Fishing became his passion and his escape. In the mid-1980s his marriage and the country fell apart. The Prime Minister was assassinated. The welfare system crumbled along with the industries that had supported it. Twenty years later Andrew Brown travelled the length of Sweden in search of the country he had loved, and then hated, and now found he loved again.