Swedish bestseller has the last laugh

Jonas Jonasson's novel about a centenarian who runs away from an old people's home was rejected by major publishers

Dalya Alberge - The Observer, Sunday 4 March 2012

Jonas Jonasson, whose novel has become a European publishing phenomenon. Photograph: Gabriela Corti

A small British publisher has acquired the UK rights to a Swedish novel that has become a European publishing phenomenon in the two years since major British and American firms rejected it.
Hesperus Press, a London-based company with a staff of five, has bought the UK rights to 50-year-old Jonas Jonasson's "laugh-out-loud funny, page-turning" novel and is likely to show its bigger rivals how wrong they were to turn it down. The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared has already been sold to 30 countries. Thanks to word-of-mouth endorsements, sales in Sweden have exceeded a million. The German translation has sold more than 500,000 copies in four months and total translation sales are approaching two million.
It is a picaresque story of a centenarian who escapes from his old people's home. While waiting for a bus, he steals a suitcase full of money belonging to a criminal gang, who chase him across Sweden. Along the way, the reader hears the story of his eventful life and the part that he played in some of the most significant events of the 20th century.
A critic from a leading Dutch newspaper, Het Laatste Nieuws, wrote of its "hilarious highlights" and a Danish newspaper reviewer likened it to Forrest Gump at the wheel.
Film adaptations are also in the pipeline. A leading Nordic film company, Nice Entertainment, is developing a production and several Hollywood studios are negotiating the remake rights.
Karl Sabbagh, managing director of Hesperus, described it as "a real feelgood book … showing that Swedes can write light, amusing novels as well as dark thrillers about serial killers". He acquired the rights after his Swedish stepmother raved about her holiday read. Fascinated by her enthusiasm, he tracked down the agent, Anna Solar-Pontas, and was astonished to discover that the rights were still available. While global English-language rights have been sold to Hyperion Books in the US, the British and Irish rights have gone to Hesperus.
UK publication is set for 12 July to coincide with Hesperus's 10th anniversary. Until now, the publisher has focused on translations and minor classics, including lesser-known Charles Dickens's and early works by Jane Austen, generally selling no more than a few thousand copies. Sabbagh said: "I managed to acquire it by convincing the agent that we were passionate about publishing it well, rather than by paying the sort of huge advance that Hesperus has never paid in its 10-year history."
He was generous enough to defend his rivals' rejection of Jonasson's novel. Noting the general assumption that foreign literature in translation does not sell well, he said the original translation was particularly poor. A new one has been commissioned. There are, however, enough translations of foreign literature – notably Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, which became a worldwide bestseller – to show publishers that readers are not as parochial as they once were.
Jonasson worked as a journalist and television producer before starting a new life as a writer, living on an island with his four-year-old son and his hens. He told the Observer he had waited 47 years before he felt "mature enough to dare" to write his first novel. Asked about the extraordinary interest across Europe, he said: "It is unreal … it can go to your head." In his own life, the experience of a "tragic divorce" and custody battle "kept me on the ground".