I would like to thank Netgalley and Random House Uk, Vintage Publishing for an advance copy of After the Fire, a stand alone novel set in the Swedish archipelago.

Fredrik Welin is a 70 year old retired surgeon who lives alone on a small island. One night he wakes up to find his house on fire. He manages to escape wearing only his coat, pyjamas and two left footed wellington boots, everything else burnt. When the police discover arson Fredrik becomes the prime suspect because there is no one else.

Told in the first person the novel follows Fredrik's actions, thoughts and memories in the months after the fire. Fredrik is not a particularly appealing character so I found the novel a bit of a slog. He is a solitary loner with poor social skills, few friends whom he always manages to upset and a dysfunctional relationship with his only child, 40 year old Louise, whom he only learned about 10 years ago. He hobbles about his relationships as he does physically in his mismatched wellies, a recurrent theme in the novel.

The novel is fairly bleak as not only does Fredrik ruminate frequently on the effects of ageing and dying, his closest associate, I hesitate to say friend, Jansson, the former postman, is a hypochondriac with similar musings and two of his acquaintances die of natural causes, cue even more ruminations. The upside is that the novel ends on a more optimistic note when his new wellies finally arrive, along with other things.

After the Fire is well written and plotted. It flows seamlessly between the current day and Fredrik's memories. I'm not sure I always got the point of these memories but I found them very interesting, more so than the present day Fredrik who, not to put too fine a point on it, is strange and rather incomprehensible.

After the Fire is not really my kind of novel - I had expected it to be more about the arson and the solution of the crime when this is rather incidental to the main thrust of the novel, the portrayal of Fredrik. It is, however, beautifully descriptive of the island and the minutiae of life, like the difficulty in finding Swedish made wellies.