A truly amazing story that will leave you crying your eyes out for more reasons than you think. Filled with loveable characters this is a great retelling of the world through a terrifying moment in history.. As a debut novel this is an author who has hit the nail on the head and provided readers with a fantastic read.

For my full review please click the link below:

https://bookwormbloggerweb.wordpress.com/2019/02/11/the-red-address-book-review/

What a lovely story.

Doris is a 96 year old woman living in Stockholm. She has no family other than her niece who lives in America and with whom she speaks to daily via Skype.

When Doris was 13, her father gave her a red address book. Doris has written the names of all of the people who she has met in this book. Doris is looking through this book and reminiscing all of the people throughout her life.

The book is full of love, death, fun, poverty and hope.

"Work on yourself. In the end, thats all that really matters. You're never anymore than your soul." I've just finished the debut novel by @sofialundberg_ and I'm feeling a little emotional...what a beautiful story.

The Red Address Book belongs to Doris, a 96 year old Swedish lady. As years have gone by, each name has been crossed out as the people have passed away. She wants to make sure her only family member, Jenny, knows all about her life and what the people in the address book meant to her so she begins to type it out. As we work through the address book we unravel Doris' life story. Some of it is beautiful, some of it incredibly painful...but all of it is her story. "I'll give you my memories. They're the most beautiful thing I have." To me, this story emphasises the different types of love that you experience in life. That of dear friends, your family, the people that come into your life for a short time and leave unexpectedly and then of course romantic love. All types of love can bring happiness, heartbreak, loss and learnings.
Taking time to imagine what being 96 is like will stay with me for a little while now. That potential loneliness, that time to reflect on so many years, so many events. It really does make you think about your own life and attitudes.
A beautiful story, well worth a read.

Thank you to @netgalley and @harpercollinsuk for the opportunity to review.

#libraryatsevern #bookstagram #readersofinstagram #igreads #bookshelf #goodreads #bookstagrammer #netgalley #theredaddressbook

A touching novel about youth, love, friendship and ageing. A little slow in places, but it will also break your heart and stitch it back together again to leave a smile on your face

What a brilliant emotional and written from the heart story, I really enjoyed this as it was something a bit different and kept you turning the pages. The be 96 and to tell someone about your life and who you met and where you went is something special. Doris relives some of her life with her grandniece who she speaks to every week but then when Doris has a fall they are united until the end but not before Doris and her lost love are reunited through the internet. Amazing story!

When she was a child her father bought her a beautiful red address book and Doris faithfully kept a note of the addresses of those who crossed her path throughout her life. At the grand old age of ninety-six it is sad but perhaps not wholly unsurprising that many of the names in the book are crossed out with the word ‘dead’ written against them.

The Red Address Book tells the story of one woman’s rich life honing in on some of the names and addresses held within the address book.
Doris lives in Stockholm and her only living family is Jenny, her Grand-Niece and her family, who live in America. Doris is not doing so well and has devoted some of her waking hours to penning the story of her life to Jenny, to keep those names in the address book alive.
I loved this book, the tone spot on for an elderly woman who has lived, loved and made good choices, and bad, and learn to live with them. I know I sound old myself but it is simply so refreshing to read books about people of this generation before everyone had to be a victim of something or another. Here we have some of those old-fashioned qualities that if I were Prime Minister I would insist were some sort of rite to becoming a fully-fledged adult. Doris has lived. After the death of her father she was more or less pushed out of the home by her mother to go and earn some money as a maid. Did Doris dwell on this rejection for the rest of her life? Did she hell! She recognised the hurt it caused at the time, and moved on treating it as a passing incident in her life, her springboard to becoming a living mannequin in Paris, rather than a hurt to be nursed for her remaining eighty odd years. During the course of the book we see Doris face a multitude of situations as she criss-crosses between countries, lives through a war, heartbreak and more and each one is faced square on, no matter what.
In conjunction with these adventures, Doris is portrayed as a ‘real’ woman, she is unwilling to do exactly what she is told by her caregivers and hospital staff, if it doesn’t make sense to her. After all this is a woman who has mastered skype to keep in touch with her family, she does not need to be told when to go to sleep as if she was a child! But at the same time she is accepting that her end is coming near and so is portrayed as a mixture of toughness and vulnerability or in other words like a real woman who has lived a full life.
I did have a lump in my throat towards the closure of this book although I’m pleased to report that it didn’t have the feeling of overtly playing with the emotions and nor did we have the stereotypical cantankerous elderly woman instead we have a thoughtful piece that will invariably cause its reader to recall many of the paths that have crossed their own, briefly or otherwise, and for whom few will be recorded in our lives particularly with the demise of written records.
I’d like to say a huge thank you to the publisher HarperCollins UK and the Sofia Lundberg who allowed me to experience some of the highs and lows of Doris’s life by allowing providing me with a copy of The Red Address Book. This review is my unbiased thanks to them.

This book is such a lovely but melancholy book. Doris is an elderly lady with her health failing starts to write her life story to leave for her great niece all surrounding her address book. The story progress seeing Doris now in her nineties with Doris in her youth travelling across the world, finding and losing her true love. Doris didn't have an easy life but she always had people who loved her. The book ends on a sad but also happy note showing you that love can endure no matter what. Overall I loved the sorry but wished there was more to her life. The story seemed to be slowly built and then after the war her life seemed rushed, as if her memoirs weren't finished. I feel I'm missing so much of her life that I'm always going to wonder about. I enjoyed the book and hope to read more of Sofia Lundberg's work.

The Red Address Book is a sweetly melancholic tale of love (of different kinds, not just romantic), death and aging.

The story tells Doris’ history as she lived in Sweden, France, England and America, with the people she met and loved, and the ways she managed to survive and make money against the odds.

Juxtaposed with the young, vigorous Doris we see present-day Doris: old, vulnerable and terribly lonely. Sofia Lundberg really brings this home in a poignant and rawly honest way: we will all get old and we will all die. Every old man/woman who needs help bathing, or dressing, or making food was once young and vibrant; world at their feet and their path yet to tread. Never have I felt my mortality more than when reading this book.

In some ways you could say that not a lot happens in this book. An elderly woman reminisces about her life and loves as she gradually weakens. Her life, whilst interesting, is a fairly ordinary one that many may have experienced in the abstract. It is the human emotion that the author exposes here that make the book stand out. That very ordinariness actually captures the general human experiences: laughter, friendship, love, loss, struggle and kindness, in a way that is recognisable and relatable to the reader.

So it is a book about not very much, but also about everything; a whole life within the pages of Doris’ address book and here for us to witness too.

Recommended for fans of emotional drama and intimate family histories.


Pleased, she sits back down at the kitchen table and smooths the tablecloth with her hands. Arranges everything carefully. The pillbox, the lozenges, the plastic case, the magnifying glass, and the phone are all back in their rightful place. When she reaches for her address book, her hand pauses, and she allows it to rest there. She hasn’t opened it in a long time, but now she lifts the cover and is met by a list of names on the first page. Most have been crossed out. In the margin, she has written it several times. One word. Dead.

– Sofia Lundberg, The Red Address Book

Review by Steph Warren of Bookshine and Readbows blog

A bittersweet novel of an elderly woman reflecting on a long, interesting and sad life, using an address book filled with the names of the dead and Skype calls with a distant relative.

There was a lot of humanity in the story, of kindness and cruelty to others, and actions that would have repercussions for generations. But the focus was all on this woman believing and knowing that she was all alone, that she would soon die, and that everyone she had once known was dead.

It was a rather emotional novel, but it wasn't really my kind of thing - although I'm sure plenty of people would love it.

Doris is a 96 year old woman with a colourful past that’s more vividly alive in her mind than the present. She reflects on her life experiences, stirred by entries in an old red address book. Memories and feelings surface as she muses on each person and their influence on her life.

An achingly sad and realistic parallel account of Doris's diminished capacity and the indignities of old age, as she bears the brunt of a variety of carers looking after her daily needs, runs in juxtaposition with the memories that surface.

When a fall at home sends her into hospital with a broken hip and heart problems, her weakness and dependency increases. Worried about her aunt's failing health, Doris's niece, Jenny, comes to visit her. On discovering the typed out text, prepared for her to read one day, she begins to familiarise herself with Doris's previously unshared life experiences.

Jenny now has opportunity to ask Doris questions and seek answers to things that were unknown or puzzling to her before. And as she does so, she begins to question her own life and relationships, wondering if the love she has for her husband Willie is as strong a bond as Doris had with Allan, her lost lover.

In reading Doris’s notes, Jenny starts to re-evaluate her own past through the lens of fact Doris presents to her. As Jenny discovers Doris’s old letters, they make her determined to give her story the happy ending it deserves. A beautiful, heartwarming, thoughtfully written book. Grateful thanks to Harper Collins and NetGalley for the ARC.

Doris is 96, lives alone in Stockholm and doesn't really see anyone apart from her carers. She does skype her grandniece and her family every week though but they live in America so they rarely visit. But she does have her memories and this story, the story of her life, is told through inspiration from the entries of her address book. A book her father gave her when she was a young girl, into which she has added the details of everyone she ever met. A book whose names are rapidly all being crossed out, a detail that nudges her to write her life story before her name too is crossed through and her memories lost forever.
This book was simply wonderful. Full of colourful characters that shaped Doris into the person she became. We follow her from her childhood right up to the present day, through tragedy and fortune as she makes her way in the world. And I mean the world as we visit many countries along the way. Through love and loss and everything in between. It's a rich story and an important story, one that tugged at my heartstrings and made a very pleasant change from my usual bread and butter crime fiction reads. Yes, it's a little bit sugary at the end but, you know what, why not! It's also a little on the slow side initially but, once it got going, I found it very hard to put down as I really immersed myself into Doris's life. It's heartwarming and heartbreaking and a wonderful story all told.
My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

“I wish you enough,” she whispered in my ear. “Enough sun to light up your days, enough rain that you appreciate the sun. Enough joy to strengthen your soul, enough pain that you can appreciate life’s small moments of happiness. And enough friends that you can manage a farewell now and then.”

This sentence is the most important one in the whole story. It is something I will remember for a long time as it has so much more meaning once you have read the rest of the authors words.

The story is told beautifully. It takes the reader through the important moments in the life of Doris, an elderly woman who finds herself reminiscing about the past as she looks through the entries written within her old address book. But it is so much more than that. It draws you into her life then and her life now, and has you desperate for things to turn out differently from what you eventually know is going to happen.

The story of Allan is one which runs throughout and is the part I loved the most. Allan’s relationship with Doris makes the epilogue even more poignant yet also absolutely the perfect ending.

“In the end, all that matters is love.

Did you love enough?”

A story everyone should read at some point in their life. Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing a copy.

I read this book in Swedish a while ago and it stayed with me, so when I saw it was being released in English, I thought it was about time I featured it on the blog and remembered why I enjoyed it.

It’s a quiet story about a woman with an address book filled with memories. As she flicks through the pages, helped by her carers, she revisits her life and a wonderful series of stories emerge. Doris is not who you first think and the life she has lived is both a touching and emotional narrative.

“I wish you enough. Enough sun to light up your days, enough rain that you appreciate the sun. Enough joy to strengthen your soul, enough pain that you can appreciate life’s small moments of happiness. And enough friends that you can manage a farewell now and then. ”

It’s set in the cities of Stockholm, Paris and New York although these are mere backdrops to a story dominated by character and emotions. I wanted to feature this book however as the story takes setting and the concept of home to another level. Home is where the heart is has never been more true.

An address book full of wishes and dreams

“I wish you enough. Enough sun to light up your days, enough rain that you appreciate the sun. Enough joy to strengthen your soul, enough pain that you can appreciate life’s small moments of happiness. And enough friends that you can manage a farewell now and then. ”

This is a story of a life lived to the full. Descriptions of nature, true love, regret, honesty and the need to feel safe. The feeling of what it is to look back and think about regrets, hopes and dreams, now ink stains in one address book, but also carvings on our hearts. I think this book will resonate with many people. As we move from one apartment in Stockholm to the ornate fashion halls of Paris, the glamourous station, and then to the great shopping metropolis of New York, war is on the horizon….. Doris has seen and done a great deal in her life, and she narrates her story with tears in her eye and hope in her heart. You can see and hear the people she talks about in her address book.

It’s a very emotional read and a book to make you think. As you turn the pages, written in diary form, you see the names crossed out at the top. This was very effective and made me think of the names in my own address book in years to come.

There’s lots of positive messages in this book despite the tears. Seems even more melancholy in Swedish for some reason. But in any language, no matter where you live, the messages of the book shine through.

I wanted to end 2018 with something different to what I usually read. So as soon as I read the blurb of 'The Red Address Book' I decided that this would be it. This is a work of fiction that sounds so real. It is the beautiful, heart-warming, emotional but also quite sad and nostalgic story of a lovely, talented and quick-witted old lady and the many memories that have shaped her long life.

Doris is just a few short years of being a centenarian, but even if she's frail and riddled with pains brought on by her old age, she still has her wits about her and remarkably, she still manages to live alone in a small apartment in Stockholm. Apart from the caregivers who visit her everyday, Doris's only contact with the outside world is with her great-niece Jenny who lives in America, through Skype on her laptop. Yes, Doris didn't let social media and technology intimidate her. Sadly, she has no other relatives living close by.

"Once upon a time I was very beautiful."

Among Doris's most precious possessions is an old address book. Over the years, in this book, Doris has recorded the name of every single person she had come across throughout her long life. Now, sadly, almost all names are crossed out and marked 'Dead'.

"There are certain memories you just can't forget. They linger and fester, occasionally bursting like a boil and causing pain, such terrible pain."

Doris doesn't want to take all her memories to the grave with her. She wants Jenny to know about all her many wonderful and painful experiences. So she starts to pick names from the address book and write down the many memories associated with those particular names.

Through her writing, Doris gives life again to the people that have left an impression on her in one way or another. With her, we relive Doris's life, her ordeals and heartbreaks, anguish and pains, but also her passion and love and happy times. From the time she was a young girl forced out of her home to start working, to the time she became the most beautiful, wanted model in Paris, then on to the time she escaped war and went to the States and then back again to her country, Sweden.

Since all my grandparents passed away before or just a few years after I was born, I have always been curious as to how life was back then, what they went through in their lives, how they managed to survive both wars. So, as I was reading this book, I imagined Doris was my grandmother telling me about her life, what she went through so many years ago, in her childhood and youth. About the heartache and suffering she had endured, about the all-consuming love she experienced. About the many people that have crossed paths with her throughout the years.

This book was originally written in Swedish, but it has been perfectly translated to English. It is not a fast read and thank goodness for that as I wanted to read it slowly so as to savour all Doris's adventures, both at glamorous and trying periods of her life. Each chapter starts in the present day with what Doris is doing and what happens to her presently. (This part made me feel so sorry for Doris as she tries to deal with the many challenges an old body presents). Then each chapter continues with a chunk of Doris's musings about some particular character from her past. I found myself laughing with Doris, feeling happy and sad with her, wondering what if... with her, and yes, by the end I ended up with my emotions all over the place, with a lump in my throat and with tears in my eyes. Tears of joy and sadness mixed together. Doris will stay with me for quite some time now.

The author has succeeded in transporting me back in time, to glamorous places such as pre-WW II Paris and to New York where Doris spent some years. The author's exquisite writing and vivid descriptions made me feel as if I was there and could clearly visualise everything.

Being a lover of historical fiction, I really enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it. With huge thanks to HarperCollins for a review copy of this book which I voluntarily accepted to read and review.

What a gem of a book, in some ways it reminded me of ‘The hundred year old man who...’ but it was far more real and had me in floods of tears by the end. The idea of telling a life story through the names in an address book was inspired and I hope there is more from Lumdberg available in English soon.

Doris's red address book holds her history. At the end of her life in her home in Sweden, she's writing down her memories to pass on to Jenny, her great-niece in America. The address book names capture good and bad times, poverty and wealth, loves and lives lost and found.

As Doris moves closer and closer to the end of her life, Jenny arrives from San Francisco to be by her side. She now has the opportunity to read through the memories Doris has addressed to her, and endeavours to resolve a long lost love story.

Alternately sweet and tearful, this is a quick read, a love story spanning the generations.

“I’ll give you my memories. They’re the most beautiful thing I have”.

The Red Address Book tells the story of Doris, a proud, stubborn, but lonely 96 year old, who, when she realises she doesn’t have much time left, writes down her life story to give to her only living relative, her great niece.

Doris goes through her address book, a reminder of all the people she has met in her lifetime. Each name tells a story good and bad. Every life is an adventure. From Sweden, to Paris, to New York, to England and back to Sweden again. From the glamorous parties of Paris, to living through the hardships of WW2 in England, to returning home and being a housemaid. With a lost love and regrets, this beautifully written evocative book is a definite tearjerker.

“I wish you enough”, she whispered in my ear. “Enough sun to light up your days, enough rain that you appreciate the sun. Enough joy to strengthen your soul, enough pain that you appreciate life’s small moments of happiness. And enough friends that you can manage a farewell now and then”.

For this read you will need to get your tissues at the ready. It is a touching yet heartbreaking story of 96 year old Doris who keeps a red address book with names and addresses of people from Doris’ life- however when she goes to look at it the majority of her friends have died. They have the word ‘dead’ next to their names.
The story and characters are both well written and show strength and depth.
Highly recommended
Thank you to both NetGalley and The Borough Press for my eARC of this book in exchange for my honest unbiased review

‘So many names pass by us in a lifetime.’

I’ll be honest, there were tears pouring down my face by the end of this one. Omg, it’s a heart-breaker, but also uplifting in its conclusion. 96-year-old Doris has kept her red address book since she was given it as a child by her father, and this book is about her writing her life story for her great-niece Jenny, putting on paper her memories so that they will live on. Her story is a remarkable one, from Sweden to Paris in the run up to the outbreak of the Second World War, fleeing to America, returning to Europe, being shipwrecked…. Yep, it’s a full and dramatic life, one that Jenny has no idea of and, as she ultimately visits Doris, she learns the whole story.

This is a book about lost love, and about living, and about accepting that life has as much pain and heartbreak as it is fun and laughter. The address book is filled with names crossed out as people die, and the book isn’t afraid to tackle head on the one inescapable fact of each and everyone one of us, that we all will die in the end. ‘Enough’ is the watchword for the book, as Doris’s mother tells her: ‘Enough joy to strengthen your soul, enough pain that you can appreciate life’s small moments of happiness.’ There are family secrets and the agony of wondering what happened to a lost love, Allan Smith, the memory of whom has haunted Doris almost her entire life. There is a subtle undertone of duality, of being neither one thing or another: Doris spends much of her life away from Sweden, Jenny lives in San Francisco but her memories of Sweden as a child are ones she does not want to lose, and Allan Smith is half-French and half-American. The sense of being uprooted, of not quite belonging, of absence, is a recurring theme.

As the book moves towards its inevitable conclusion, I was caught up in the emotion of it all. Yes, perhaps Doris’s life was a little too extraordinary to believe, and yes perhaps the ending (which I won’t spoil here) was a little too contrived, but this is one of those books that reaches in and wrenches your heart. It makes you look at your own life and your relationships with family and friends, and it might just make you wonder: did you love enough? So reach for your phone and call someone, tomorrow might be too late. A warming, heart-breaking tale, full of humanity and compassion and the struggles of loving. Definitely recommended.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in return for an honest and unbiased review.)