Publishers Weekly
03/28/2022
A revenge scheme goes hilariously awry in this zany if glib farce from Jonasson (The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man). Swedish white nationalist Victor connives to inherit a wealthy art dealer’s fortune by marrying his much younger daughter, Jenny Alderheim. First, Victor flies his Black 18-year-old son, Kevin (born to one of his regular sex workers) to Kenya and abandons him there. Ole Mbatian, a prominent Maasai medicine man, adopts Kevin and tutors him in traditional skills. Kevin shows aptitude, but he returns to Sweden to avoid circumcision; there, he falls in love with Jenny, newly divorced from Victor. Kevin and Hugo Hamlin, a former adman who runs a business offering revenge for petty grievances, hatch a scheme to implicate Victor in art forgery, drug use, and sexual deviancy. Then Ole comes looking for Kevin, and as the three try to bring Victor to justice, their mission is complicated by cultural miscommunications, incompetent police detectives, and Kevin and Jenny’s guilelessness. The jokes can feel a bit lazy, particularly when they come at the expense of Ole’s unfamiliarity with contemporary European culture, though Jonasson manages to keep the reader invested in the revenge campaign. There’s not much nuance, but it’s still a page-turner. Agent: Erik Larsson, Albatros. (May)
From the Publisher
A revenge scheme goes hilariously awry in this zany if glib farce from Jonasson. . . . [Sweet Sweet Revenge LTD is] a page turner.” — Publishers Weekly
"In the first chapters of Sweet, Sweet Revenge Ltd there's enough plot for several novels... Jonas Jonasson, best known for The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, is a wildly inventive writer, often funny, who stuffs his bonkers but entertaining story with art, politics and romance, and a tongue-in-cheek meditation on the philosophy of getting even. Great fun." — The Times (London)
"Jonas Jonasson creates hilarity out of brilliantly absurd plots, whether it is a 100-year-old man escaping through an old folk' home window, or a South African peasant girl who saves the King of Sweden. His latest unlikely hero is Kevin who is abandoned by his callous father on the Kenyan savannah in the expectation he will be eaten by lions...Add a crooked art dealer, a lazy Swedish policeman, an ophthalmologist whose wife ditched him for a urologist, and we are set for delicious Jonasson mayhem." — Daily Express (London)
“Uproariously funny.” — Shelf Awareness
"A glorious romp which confirms Jonas Jonasson’s status as the most brilliant comic novelist alive." — Daily Mirror (UK)
"[A] comedic epic." — Los Angeles Daily News
Daily Express (London)
"Jonas Jonasson creates hilarity out of brilliantly absurd plots, whether it is a 100-year-old man escaping through an old folk' home window, or a South African peasant girl who saves the King of Sweden. His latest unlikely hero is Kevin who is abandoned by his callous father on the Kenyan savannah in the expectation he will be eaten by lions...Add a crooked art dealer, a lazy Swedish policeman, an ophthalmologist whose wife ditched him for a urologist, and we are set for delicious Jonasson mayhem."
The Times (London)
"In the first chapters of Sweet, Sweet Revenge Ltd there's enough plot for several novels... Jonas Jonasson, best known for The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, is a wildly inventive writer, often funny, who stuffs his bonkers but entertaining story with art, politics and romance, and a tongue-in-cheek meditation on the philosophy of getting even. Great fun."
Library Journal
12/01/2021
Examining colonialism, art history, and greed, Jonasson's Sweet, Sweet Revenge LTD brings together Maasai warrior Ole Mbatian Jr.; Kevin, the young man he calls his son: and trod-upon Agneta, who joins forces with Kevin against an underhanded gallery owner with the help of a Stockholm company specializing in revenge services (originally scheduled for July 2021; 60,000-copy first printing). Successful realtors serving tourists at The Shore, Brian and Margot Dunne face a different kind of summer in Runde's debut; even as daughters Liz and Evy seek self-redefining experiences, the entire family struggles with the tragedy of Brian's brain tumor (125,000-copy first printing). In Straub's This Time Tomorrow, Alice is reasonably contented but wishes she were closer to her father, and she gets the chance at a remake when she wakes up one morning in 1996 as a 16-year-old. In Weiner's latest, when Veronica Levy bought The Summer Place on the Outer Cape, she imagined it staying in the family for generations. But with the family now dispersed, she gathers everyone together for one last blow-out summer until she sells it (350,000-copy first printing).
