Excerpt from My Friends by Fredrik Backman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One

Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human. The evidence for this is very simple: little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don't think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.

It's one of the last days before Easter. Very soon Louisa is going to be thrown out of an art auction for vandalising a valuable painting. Old ladies will shriek and the police will come and it really wasn't planned. Not to brag, but Louisa did have a perfect plan, it wasn't the plan's fault that she didn't stick to it. Because sometimes Louisa is a genius, but sometimes she isn't a genius, and the problem is that the genius and the non-genius share a brain. But the plan? Perfect.

The auction is one where extremely rich people go to buy ridiculously expensive art, so teenagers aren't welcome there, especially not teenagers with backpacks full of cans of spray paint. Rich adults have seen far too much news about "activists" who break in and vandalize famous paintings, so for that reason the entrance is protected by security guards weighing three hundred pounds with zero ounces of humor. They're the sort of guards who have so much muscle that they have muscles that don't even have Latin names, because back when people spoke Latin, idiots as big as this didn't even exist yet. But that shouldn't have been a problem, because the plan was for Louisa to get in without the guards even noticing she was there. The only problem with the plan was that Louisa was the person who was going to carry it out. But it started well, it has to be said, because the building where the auction is being held is an old church. We know that because all the rich people at the auction keep saying to each other: "Did you know this is an old church?" Because rich people love reminding each other about how incredibly rich they are, so rich that they can buy things from God.

In a couple of days, at the start of Easter, obviously no one in the room will spare a thought for God, because then God won't have anything interesting to sell to them. But the thing that's so incredible about God is that God understands people's needs, so there are always bathrooms in churches, so Louisa broke in through one of the bathroom windows, in full accordance with the plan. Her friend Fish taught her how to do that. Fish is the best at everything. For instance, the best at losing things, and the best at breaking things, but she is the best of all at breaking into things. And Louisa? She's bad at pretty much everything, but good at being angry. Not to brag, but she's actually world-class at that. And she's particularly angry about rich people buying art, because rich people are the worst sort of adults, and the worst way to vandalise art is actually to put a damn price tag on it. That's why rich adults hate the sort of thing that Louisa paints on the walls of buildings, not because they love walls, but because they hate the fact that there are beautiful things that are free.

So Louisa got in through the window with a backpack full of cans of spray paint and a perfect plan. When she tumbled onto the floor inside the bathroom, she stopped for a while and painted a very realistic portrait of the guards on the wall. A more shallow artist might have chosen to portray them as bulls, seeing as their necks were so thick it was impossible to tell where their heads began, but Louisa would never do that. Because she can see inside people, so she painted the guards as jellyfish. Because jellyfish, like guards, have neither backbones nor brains.

Then she put on a white dress shirt and snuck into the crowd.

It has to be said that Louisa hates many things about herself, but most of all her height and her weight. She's wished for many things throughout her childhood, but perhaps none greater than to be smaller. She doesn't like her body because there's too much of it, she doesn't like her voice because it's too deep, she doesn't like her brain because it always tells her to talk when she's nervous. Most of all she doesn't like her heart because it's always nervous. Stupid, stupid heart.

Excerpted from My Friends by Fredrik Backman. Copyright © 2025 by Fredrik Backman. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.