Books › The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden
The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden
400 pages
A wildly improbable, globe-trotting caper that proves the world's most dangerous weapon is a hyper-competent woman surrounded by idiots.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like strapping into a geopolitical roller coaster designed by a madman with a brilliant sense of humor. The narrative moves at a brisk, unpredictable clip, bouncing from the slums of South Africa to the snowy streets of Sweden on a wave of sheer, delightful absurdity. The prose is wonderfully deadpan, treating smuggled diamonds, secret nuclear arsenals, and kidnapped monarchs with the same dry, matter-of-fact detachment. It creates a mood that is relentlessly zany and chaotic, yet anchored by a deeply satisfying emotional core: the joy of watching a brilliant, underestimated underdog outwit a world run by incompetent men. It will thoroughly delight readers who crave sharp satire, sprawling picaresque adventures, and a healthy dose of irreverent optimism.
- Mood
- zany
- chaotic
- unpredictable
- lighthearted
- Tone
- wry
- deadpan
- satirical
- irreverent
- absurdist
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- absurdity of bureaucracy · power of intellect · serendipity and chance · ridiculousness of geopolitics · defying expectations
- The writing
- Delivers outrageous coincidences and high-stakes geopolitical blunders with a dry, matter-of-fact detachment that heightens the comedy.
- The arc
- Begins in bleak circumstances but quickly accelerates into a wildly triumphant, laugh-out-loud journey of outsmarting the world's most powerful fools.
- Who it's for
- Fans of sprawling, picaresque satires who delight in hyper-competent underdogs navigating a world run by incompetent authorities.
Content notes
- Apartheid-era racism
- nuclear weapon threats
- substance abuse references
About the book
In a tiny shack in the largest township in South Africa, Nombeko Mayeki is born. Put to work at five years old and orphaned at ten, she quickly learns that the world expects nothing more from her than to die young, be it from drugs, alcohol, or just plain despair. But Nombeko has grander plans. She learns to read and write, and at just fifteen, using her cunning and fearlessness, she makes it out of Soweto with millions of smuggled diamonds in her possession. Then things take a turn for the worse... Nombeko ends up the prisoner of an incompetent engineer in a research facility working on South Africa's secret nuclear arsenal. Yet the unstoppable Nombeko pulls off a daring escape to Sweden, where she meets twins named Holger One and Holger Two, who are carrying out a mission to bring down the Swedish monarchy... by any means necessary. Nombeko's life ends up hopelessly intertwined with the lives of the twins, and when the twins arrange to kidnap the Swedish king and prime minister, it is up to our unlikely heroine to save the day -- and possibly the world.
Description from Open Library.
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