Anxious People (Trevozhnye Lyudi)

Missing the signature 'Bakman prose'—unusual, elegant, and touching? Check out 'Anxious People'—a reminder that each of us carries a bag of pain, one we drag around everywhere and don't know where to put it.
A brave eighty-year-old woman, an IKEA-addicted couple, a pregnant woman, a multimillionaire seeking to end his life...these and several others have become hostages of a hapless robber. He wanted easy money and a bank robbery, but luck has never been his strong suit. And now he's forced to hide from the police in a neighboring apartment. Taking eight hostages was definitely not part of his plan. And even more so, their most intimate stories, which they begin to share, were not included.
'Anxious People' is a whole gallery of vulnerable characters, human nature, subtly observed by Backman, woven from flaws and imperfections, and that is precisely why it is alive.