The Red Address Book

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.