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, first in a housing estate on the edge of Gothenberg, and then in a makeshift chalet in the forest. Fishing became his passion and his escape from a country that alternately seduced and oppressed him with its mixture of communal philanthropy and deep conservatism. During the 1980s his marriage and his country fell apart as the temptations and compulsions of the outside world forced their way in. The prime minister, Olof Palme, was shot on a Stockholm street. The welfare system crumbled along with the industries that had supported it. Twenty years after Palme's assassination, Andrew Brown travelled the length of Sweden in search of the country he had loved, and then hated, and now found he loved again.
Andrew Brown lived in Sweden as a child in the 1960s. Ten years later, he returned: he married a Swedish woman and worked in a timber mill, raising his small son, first of all in a housing estate on the edge of Gothenberg, and then in a makeshift chalet in the forest. This book tells his story and woven into it is the landscape of Sweden.
