Everything Backman writes is gold. I love this novel and the entire Beartown series. I started reading the first novel, Beartown, as I'm an avid hockey fan. But, as with all Backman's novel, there is more to his books that what the reader may think. This is a big five star plus. ( )

The Winners begins with this: “You want to understand this place? Then you need to understand it’s connections, the way everything and everyone is tied to everything and everyone else by invisible threads of relationships and loyalties and debts…. That’s made people stick together and survive out here, but it’s also made us commit terrible crimes against each other” (2-3).

Beautiful and soulful and mournful—this book was everything I needed it to be in order to say goodbye to some of my favorite literary characters in one of my favorite fictional places (and I don’t even like the cold). I loved every second of this lengthy, final storyline, even though, from the beginning, we know that with the end will come more grief and trauma, like a slow-crawling lamentable dirge.

This story picks up two years after the end of Us Against You where we learn about what’s transpired with some of our favorites like Benji and Ana and Amat and where we’re also introduced to some new favorites like Johnny and Hannah and Tess. As the story moves towards an end, we watch these characters work to find that elusive happiness while battling Mother Nature’s wrath and political maneuvering and ghosts of the past and—most of all—each other. And, in the end, it’s the need for each other that winds up saving these hard, but lovable, forest people.

Like the other two books, Beartown and Us Against You, The Winners is about the best and the worst in us, about the blessing and curse of a tight-knit community (actually, two tight-knit, feuding communities that are tucked tightly together in a northern, desolate forest on the edge of a frozen lake). It’s about these two communities and the connected stories of choices and chance that make up Hed and Beartown where hockey is life and loyalty to one another is breath.

Just as these places are tucked together on the edge of some northern nowhere, be prepared for these characters to tuck themselves into the crevices of your heart. ( )

I was really looking forward to this book and after a gripping start, I found much of it dragged as it rehashed aspects of the two previous books. It really could have been much shorter and I got tired of the moralistic voice of the narrator. The climax is devastating and proved to be a tear jerker. I am glad I have completed the series but not sure I nt to read more of Backman's writing. ( )

Nearly 700 pages long. It basically included information from previous Beartown books to correlate with what is currently happening and even gave us clues as to what will happen to the main characters. A thoughtful, readable book that instilled hope in the rival communities of Beartown and Hed. It instilled hope in the two towns to enjoy a friendly rivalry instead of a blood-thirsty rivalry. It brought a conclusion to the lives of those involved in all the Beartown novels. Kirkus: ife continues haltingly for the inhabitants of Beartown and its rival borough, Hed.As in the two earlier books in this series (Beartown, 2017; Us Against You, 2018), things are never settled between these two hockey-obsessed towns in the forests of Sweden. Only one can seemingly do well at a time�resourcewise or hockeywise; the two are interchangeable¥and their residents share a mutual, pathological hatred. Beloved characters return, new ones are introduced, tragedy is promised. Backman repeatedly tells the reader about his characters? overwhelming love for each other, but their ability to actually care for one another comes and goes with the demands of the unwieldy plot. He wants to assure readers that this makes his characters complex, but it really renders them pawns. To stoke the conflict between the towns, he includes not only the pregnancy-ending factory accident of a nameless woman (ushering in a suspiciously out-of-place anti-abortion sentiment), but also the murder of a beloved dog. These machinations are not alone in being soppy and unearned. The book is almost 700 pages long and covers only a two-week span. Backman writes with wit and sincerity and is a talented web-spinner, but with a tale this long, the lack of nuance becomes grating. There?s also a brief ?not all men? message that, given the toxic nature of the narrative, is hard to ignore.A moralistic noir masquerading as a heart-warmer.

I highly recommend this book and its predecessors in the Beartown series. They are on my favorites list of best reads for all time.
The setting and plotting are extraordinary, characters were extremely complex and real. This is not a book about hockey or small towns. It is a book about people with all of their beauty and faults. It's about relationships that grow through the pain, and others that fall apart. The complexity is startling. Backman's observations about people and their relationships is simply deeper than most literature I have read.
Read these books. You will not be disappointed. ( )