From Johannes Lichtman comes a wisely comic debut novel about a teacher whose efforts to stay sober land him in Sweden, but the refugee crisis forces a very different kind of reckoning.
You donāt have to be perfect to do good...
Jonas Anderson wants a fresh start.
Heās made plenty of bad decisions in his life, and at age twenty-eight heās been fired from yet another teaching position after assigning homework like, Attend a strangerās funeral and write about it. But, heās sure a move to Sweden, the country of his motherās birth, will be just the thing to kick-start a new and improvedāand newly soberāJonas.
When he arrives in Malmo in 2015, the city is struggling with the influx of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. Driven by an existential need to ādo good,ā Jonas begins volunteering with an organization that teaches Swedish to young migrants. The connections he makes there, and one student in particular, might send him down the right path toward fulfillmentāif he could just get out of his own way.
āSuch Good Work is, indeed, a bit Jonas-like: itās wary of affectation or grandstanding; it works small, as if from a sense of modesty, a reluctance to presume; it cuts sincerity with the driest of humorā (The New Yorker). In his debut, Lichtman, āa remarkable thinker and social satiristā (The New York Times Book Review), spins a darkly comic story, brought to life with wry observations and searing questions about our modern world, and told with equal measures of grace and wit.