Such Good Work

A timely and provocative debut novel that Rivka Galchen calls "wisely comic and tremendously moving," about a creative writing teacher whose efforts to stay sober land him in Malmö, Sweden, where drugs are scarce but the refugee crisis forces a very different kind of reckoning.YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT TO DO GOOD Jonas Anderson wants a fresh start. He's made plenty of bad decisions in his life, and at age twenty-eight he's been fired from yet another teaching position after assigning homework like, Visit a stranger's funeral and write about it. But, he's sure a move to Sweden, the country of his mother's birth, will be just the thing to kick-start a new and improved—and newly sober—Jonas. When he arrives in Malmo in 2015, the city is struggling with the influx of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. Driven by an existential need to "do good," Jonas begins volunteering with an organization that teaches...