Beartown cover art

Beartown

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Beartown

By: Fredrik Backman
Narrated by: John Sackville
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Beartown by Fredik Backman, read by John Sackville.

Beartown is a small town in a large Swedish forest.

For most of the year it is under a thick blanket of snow, experiencing the kind of cold and dark that brings people closer together - or pulls them apart.

Its isolation means that Beartown has been slowly shrinking with each passing year. But now the town is on the verge of an astonishing revival. A bright new future is just around the corner.

Until the day it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act.

It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten, and those who'll risk the future to see justice done. At last, it falls to one young man to find the courage to speak the truth that it seems no one else wants to hear.

With the town's future at stake, no one can stand by or stay silent. Everyone is on one side or the other.

Which side would you be on?

Previously published as The Scandal.

©2017 Fredrik Backman (P)2017 Penguin Audio Crime Thrillers Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Small Town & Rural Sports Suspense Thriller Thriller & Suspense Crime

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Hidden in Snow cover art
The Poisonwood Bible cover art
The Blood Strand cover art
Second Shot cover art
Nothing More Dangerous cover art
The Kite Runner cover art
It Ends with Us cover art
An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club) cover art
Empire Falls cover art
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things cover art
Hate to Love You cover art
Noughts and Crosses cover art

Critic reviews

"As popular Swedish exports go, Backman is up there with ABBA and Stieg Larsson." (The New York Times Book Review)
All stars
Most relevant
I really enjoyed this book, a great story but also loved the context, as it's a setting I knew nothing about. The characters were extremely well developed and you can empathize with them all. It was also great to listen to a story set in ice and snow in the middle of a Madrid 40 degree summer.

Learnt a lot about ice hockey!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
OMG this book was brilliant. I couldn't stop listening it was fantastic. I loved this book.

excellent

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I have loved all of Bachman’s previous books. I love his gentle humor and his social observations so I was a bit reticent when I saw his latest book was about ice hockey.

I shouldn’t have worried. This is a beautifully written and performed book that is about community, human nature, teams oh and ice hockey and it is wonderful.

This book covers a lot of serious issues but it manages to do it in a way that gets the reader thinking about different perspectives and why people are how they are and it dies this in a manner which somehow keeps the book light and interesting.

I don’t want to spoil it for you but outlining the plot so all I will say is that I am so sad that I have finished the book and I am looking eagerly online to see if Fredrik Bachman has anything else planned.

Another beautiful book by Fredrik Bachman.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
really love this book,its a rollercoaster of emotions, coming from a small village it reminded me of growing up and if you replaced hockey with rugby it was very much like the small town mentality that I grew up around. this book is definitely a must and should be available in schools to get kids to think about all of the subjects the book covers.

a must listen

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The book is well written and the plot moves at a good pace, while at the same time giving your the back story to each character. This review is more about the reading of the book. The book is well read except when it comes to the narrator reading the voices, he puts on the most awful accents that spoil the story. The book is set in Sweden yet his accents sound like some poor West Country accent from Cornwall, why did he do that? When he narrates the story in his normal voice it is extremely well read and a delight to listen to, but those accents are shockers!

Great story even if you don't like hockey

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews