Blog Tour – ‘The Father’ by Anton Svensson

Today sees the start of the blog tour for ‘The Father’ and I am very excited to be one of several book bloggers kicking it off.  Published by Sphere in paperback on the 24^th March 2016, I was kindly sent a proof copy to read and review.

‘The Father’ is a work of fiction, inspired by the shocking true story of three brothers who came to be Sweden’s most wanted criminals.  In the early 1990s they committed a total of ten bank robberies in just over two years.  All under 24 years of age, they had never before done anything against the law.

In this intoxicating and heart-breaking thriller, the fourth brother, who was aware of what was going on but was not involved in the robberies, tells the story of three boys who grew up from innocent children to become public enemy number one, and of the father who made them that way.

This was my very first experience of Swedish crime fiction.  I was interested in giving this book a go especially when I saw that it was based on true events.  ‘The Father’ is quite a long book and I didn’t really know how I would get on with it but I soon found myself getting into the story.

I thought ‘The Father’ was very well written.  I found it to be an exciting, intriguing and addictive read.  It’s a story about sticking together as a family, brotherly love and the complex relationship between a father and his sons.  Leo was always so protective and loving of his two younger brothers, especially Vincent, his baby brother.  There was a lot of violence in this story and occasionally I had to put the book down for a little while as there was so much going on in my head, but I was soon back reading it.

Split into four parts, this book goes back and forth between the present and the past, the now and then, telling the story of the three brothers and their childhood.  As children they witnessed things they really shouldn’t have had to.  Their innocence was taken away from them at a young age by their father, Ivan, a hard and brutal man who believed in being able to protect yourself with your fists.  Perhaps he thought he was doing the right thing in teaching his eldest son, Leo, how to fight back.  I have to say I did wonder at times why so much emphasis was put on the brothers’ childhood, but as I saw later this was a very necessary part of the story.

‘The Father’ is the first part of a two-part series, with the second part, ‘The Son’ to be published in hardback in 2017 which I am looking forward to reading.

I give this book 4 out of 5.

 

Author Biography

‘Anton Svensson’ is a pseudonym for Stefan Thunberg and Anders Roslund.

Stefan Thunberg is one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated screenwriters. His body of work spans popular TV-series such as Henning Mankell’s Wallander and Håkan Nesser’s Van Veeteren as well as two of Sweden’s biggest box office successes in recent years: Hamilton and Jägarna 2. While Thunberg achieved fame as a screenwriter, the rest of his family became infamous in an entirely different way: his father and brothers were Sweden’s most notorious bank robbers, dubbed Militärligan (The Military Gang) by the media. The Father is Stefan Thunberg’s debut novel.

Anders Roslund is an award-winning investigative journalist and one of the most successful and critically acclaimed Scandinavian crime writers of our time. Roslund is part of the New York Times bestselling author duo Roslund & Hellström, who are recipients of many prestigious awards, including the CWA International Dagger, the Glass Key and the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award, and who boast sales exceeding five million copies. Films and TV series based on Roslund & Hellström’s novels are in the works, both in Hollywood and Europe. The Father is Anders Roslund’s seventh novel and the first he has co-authored with Stefan Thunberg.

 

‘The Father’ is available to buy on Amazon UK – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Father-Made-Sweden-Anton-Svensson/dp/0751557811/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1459172753&sr=1-1