Gentlemen

It all began a year earlier, when he was rooming with Henry Morgan, a boxer, piano player, composer, bartender, and old-fashioned gentleman with a Gatsby-like capacity for turning life into a feast and absolutely no talent for keeping secrets. The two friends led the high-life in Stockholm until the day Henry’s younger brother Leo — a star poet, drunk, political provocateur — showed up. Leo drags them into a scandal involving illegal weapons and gangsters, and soon the three men find themselves unwittingly and irreversibly trapped in a dangerous plot.

Written with an intense regard for storytelling and style, Gentlemen is the most important literary work to emerge from Sweden in the past thirty years — simultaneously celebrating and mourning the post-WWII era’s jazz music, poetry, hidden treasures, and espionage.