Such Good Work, Johannes Lichtman
Such Good Work, Johannes Lichtman
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Such Good Work

Author: Johannes Lichtman

Narrator: Jacques Roy

Unabridged: 6 hr 30 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/05/2019


Synopsis

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 don’t have to be perfect to do good...

Jonas Anderson wants a fresh start.

He’s made plenty of bad decisions in his life, and at age twenty-eight he’s been fired from yet another teaching position after assigning homework like, Attend a stranger’s funeral and write about it. But, he’s sure a move to Sweden, the country of his mother’s birth, will be just the thing to kick-start a new and improved—and newly sober—Jonas.

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 “do good,” 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 fulfillment—if he could just get out of his own way.

“Such Good Work is, indeed, a bit Jonas-like: it’s 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 humor” (The New Yorker). In his debut, Lichtman, “a remarkable thinker and social satirist” (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.

About Johannes Lichtman

Johannes Lichtman’s debut novel,?Such Good Work, was chosen as a?5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation.?His work has appeared in?Tin House,?The Sun,?Travel + Leisure,?Los Angeles Review of Books,?Oxford American, and elsewhere.?He lives in Washington, DC. 


Reviews

Jonas Anderson is starting over. Again. He’s made some wrong turns and thinks Sweden is the ticket for a new life. It’s hard to find drugs there, and drugs are one of his vices. Malmo, Sweden has its own challenges as a city and for Jonas. The first is the large number of refugees and how to help th......more

Goodreads review by Donna

I was invited to read this debut novel by Net Galley and Simon and Schuster, but when I first saw it in my inbox, I recoiled. Another addiction memoir! Another chance to live through someone else’s excruciating nightmare! But then I read a few early reviews—they didn’t bear the numbed courtesy of an......more