After the Fire cover art

After the Fire

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

After the Fire

By: Henning Mankell, Marlaine Delargy - translator
Narrated by: Sean Barrett
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £9.48

Buy Now for £9.48

Summary

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.

 Genre Fiction International Mystery & Crime Mystery Small Town & Rural Suspense Thriller & Suspense Fiction Crime
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c

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.
All stars
Most relevant

This is Mankell’s final book written just before his death two years ago in 2015 and now translated into English. Forget all his Wallanders and other crime novels, this is a stand-alone work of great poignancy and depth so beautifully read that you accept Sean Barrett as Mankell himself, as well as the retired doctor Welin whose story this is.

A description of the scenario sounds like 11 hours of unremittingly melancholy. 70 year-old Welin (retired after an operation he was carrying out went horribly wrong) lives alone on an isolated Swedish archipelago in the house which had belonged to his parents. After it is burned down by an arsonist, he loses everything; his ill-tempered, troubled daughter Louise, who grew up away from him, makes a visit which is both uncomfortable and irritating for him. Even his meal contains ‘fatigue and sorrow’, and the fish and the humans are disappearing from the island. It seems ‘an ocean of emptiness’ like the Japanese-style garden Louise would like to make on the island, and there is a great deal about loneliness and loss.

But it is all so gentle (and Sean Barrett’s voice is wonderful for this) and so insightful that it doesn’t seem merely melancholy. There is the low-key crime investigation (who is the arsonist setting fire to other houses?) which makes Welin muse on just how well we ever know others; there is a new life which could grow into the next century, and his deepening relationship with his daughter; his not entirely satisfactory but treasured friendship with the prickly journalist decades younger than himself; there’s his memories of the past which come back to him in waves and make Welin entirely real and human as he (and I think Mankell) reviews his life and awaits the end he knows must come. The novel ends as Welin’s house is being re-built, the fish have returned to the sea: the final note is one of uplift and redemption (which I can’t explain without spoiling the plot). This one will stay with you.

A beautiful elegiac farewell

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
If you're a fan of Wallander, you will soon settle into the typical style of Mankell. It isn't exactly a who-done-it, though it contains a mystery. It has that very thoughtful, slightly depressed feel to it that Mankell adopted as he aged. An older man faces the last years of his life after a fire has burnt down his house and taken all that he possesses in one fell swoop. What turns out to be important is a surprise. A setting in which nothing turns out quite as you would imagine. It captured my attention, however - some books just don't let you go until the end, and this was one. Hard to understand why people choose to live on isolated Swedish islands, and worse when you have little but basic shelter against the elements in winter. But people have lived this way for generations, and they do survive, as our man does. It has that atmospheric something of Scandi noir which is a welcome antidote to the perennial sunny climes of the Mediterranean.

Sean Barrett has the gift of making you feel he is personally reading to you by the fireside on a dark night when you can only be thankful for the shelter you possess and wish everyone had it.

Last of Mankell well worth the read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Well told by henning mankell .. By no means an action novel, but the thoughts and actions of the failed surgeon who is the” narrator”, especially about his relationship s with two women are fascinating. A beautiful story carefully told by Mankell at his best.

A beautiful story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Reading the Audible UK synopsis you may well expect a tense whodunnit with our hero battling to identify the arsonist before they can make another attempt on his life.
If so, you will be disappointed.
In reality the fire is really only used to introduce the main character Fredrik.
We then go on a very long and rambling account of his past, present and his hopes for the future. I didn’t find him an easy character to empathise with and a times he was simply un-likeable.
The mystery of fire is not a constant theme through the story but is not eventually solved.
I found the whole tone of the book depressing.
So to recap,
A rambling story line.
No action.
Unpleasant main character.
Not much in the way of suspense and depressing.
However, it had me totally hooked.
I’m at a bit of a loss to explain why. Perhaps I was just listening in anticipation of something actually happening. Or it was a morbid fascination with the fate of Fredrik.
A strange book.

A strange book.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Sometimes a bit long but Henning Mankell ist still Henning Mankell. This is perhaps his strangest story and his way to deal with death.

Great final book of a great author

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews