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This is the big, definitive book about Olof Palme and his life, written with an international readership in mind. Palme’s life stretches over the epoch that is sometimes called ‘the short 20th century’. He was born eight years after the end of the First World War and died three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The great issues of those times are reflected in his life and work.

“Nothing in his life was so beautiful as the way he left it” That was said of an executed statesman in Shakespeare’s drama about the Scottish king in the Middle Ages, Macbeth. But with Olof Palme it was the opposite. The brutal murder in the centre of Stockholm a February night 25 years ago has left a shadow on his life. There is no simple posthumous reputation. He was the aristocrat who became a socialist. The individualist who became the leader of Sweden’s largest political organisation. The cavalry officer who worked for disarmament. The class betrayer who was proud of his bourgeois family background. The lover of literature who didn’t get on with authors. The friend of America who attacked the government of the USA. The anticommunist who embraced Fidel Castro.

Who was he – really – we ask ourselves uneasily. And belive that the answer is to be found in some mysterious secret room to which those after him still haven’t managed to gain access. This is a book about the man Olof Palme and the short, dramatic 20th century. It moves from silent large apartments in the best quarters in Stockholm to boiling metropolises in Southeast Asia, from private boarding schools to education centres for party functionaries run by the Swedish Social Democratic party. From country estates in Sweden to shabby drugstores in the American South. So the question is not just: “Who was Olof Palme?” but also: “Who are we, the people wondering?”

Press voices: 

Palme and his era have never been better described than this
“One of the things that makes Henrik Berggren’s book so fascinating are the pictures of the times, of Sweden from 1900 up until Palme’s death in1986. Someone might perhaps object that deep dives into Swedish culture don’t have anything to do with the subject of the biography, Palme, but we are reminded that before he was murdered he went to the cinema and saw a Swedish film with his wife without any bodyguards.”
Jörn Donner in SR Kulturnytt

 A grandiose story of a brilliant politician
“Olof Palme never became the elder statesman. He became an icon. A person and politician that everyone must take a stand on. In that respect, he is unique in Swedish political history. Henrik Berggren’s book about him is a grandiose story. I read it, large sections at a time. The days go by and I just keep on reading. Indeed, I devour it. Eat it. Delight in it. /../ Wonderful days ahead is the story of a bourgeois boy’s path through the late 20th century. It is unforgettable.” Expressen

Brilliant
“It is something of a shock – and edifying – to read Henrik Berggren’s 700-page biography of Olof Palme, not least in election times when politics are simplified and all intellectualism is removed to such a degree that things become almost unbearable /…/

It isn’t just that he writes well, knowledgeably, searchingly, and with linguistic stringency. There is something else that lifts this book from good to brilliant. He succeeds in placing Palme in a context by describing environments and the spirit of the time so well. He portrays these and doesn’t just reduce them to a background for a portrait of a person. The inner tensions of the international student movement, and the anguish of the early years of the Cold War, influenced Palme to a considerable degree and he had a central role in the work there. But, all the time, Palme is one of several who are active. Instead of being simplified to let Palme be a dues ex machina, the man who can fix everything,  the picture is made more complicated.

And the same applies to all the chapters – the Vietnam War, the struggle for Employee Funds, the Palme Commission and his international work – with Palme becoming a part of the reality that Berggren lets us meet, and this makes Palme greater; it doesn’t diminish him as one might expect. Authors and other cultural people are given room in the book and their positive as well as negative meetings with Palme are described in such a way that they never seem like walk-on parts. Palme didn’t read books because he had to, but because he was a part of a cultural context.

What might surprise a younger reader, not least those who have their doubts as to Palme’s central position in political history, is Berggren’s obvious respect for Palme. He isn’t out to devalue Palme’s role, but nor has he written a panegyric. With the competence of a historian, he has given us a text book which will help people today – the Palme enthusiasts who look back to his great days, as well as the manic Palme haters – to reflect upon Palme’s true worth.”
HD

A successful and brilliantly carried-out story
“Henrik Berggren’s biography of Olof Palme is, however you look at it, a successful and brilliantly carried-out story of Swedish society in the 20th century, with its political and social conflicts, as well as a complete description of the life and deeds of Olof Palme./…/ As I wrote in the introduction to this review, biography is an especially difficult genre. It is so because every person’s life contains mysteries and riddles that cannot be unlocked even with the keys of science. I can’t, however, help feeling that Berggren in this superb biography has come extremely close to the true picture of Olof Palme, the man and the politician.”
Svenska Dagbladet

It is astonishing, bold and liberating / P.O.Enquist
“Henrik Berggren’s large Palme biography is in a way completely unique. In several long sections, he discusses the role of culture as if it actually was reality. Books, authors, cultural debates – he places culture in the big picture of modernity, society, and Olof Palme. It is astonishing, bold, and liberating.”
Per Olov Enquist in Dagens Nyheter