The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden

Nombeko Mayeki grows up on a rubbish dump in Soweto, South Africa, during apartheid. Through a chain of wildly improbable events, she ends up working in a secret nuclear weapons facility, stealing an atomic bomb, and eventually crossing paths with the King of Sweden. Jonasson applies the same absurdist formula that made his debut a sensation: take real history, add fictional characters of superhuman resilience and minimal common sense, and see what happens.

Why Start Here

If you loved the first novel and want more of Jonasson’s particular brand of comic fiction, this delivers exactly that. The formula is similar but the setting is different, moving from the Cold War to apartheid South Africa, with a female protagonist whose resourcefulness and dry wit rival Allan Karlsson’s. It is slightly longer and more sprawling than the debut, but equally entertaining.

What to Expect

A 432-page comic novel with the same alternating structure of historical and contemporary storylines. The humor is broad and the coincidences outrageous. Jonasson does not shy away from serious subjects like apartheid and nuclear proliferation, but treats them with the same irreverent absurdism he applies to everything.