The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife Is the Literary Gut-Punch You Didn’t Know You Needed

Read time: 4 minutes

🎧 Listened in audio
📢 Narrated by Tim Carroll
⏱ Duration: 11 hours
🏷️ Publisher: William Morrow
📅 Published: September 10, 2024

Book Blurb:

For fans of Remarkably Bright Creatures and A Man Called Ove, Anna Johnston’s warm, life-affirming debut follows eighty-two-year-old Frederick Fife — a man born with an extra helping of kindness and not nearly enough people left to give it to. Broke, lonely, and facing homelessness, Fred stumbles into a bizarre case of mistaken identity and finds himself living at a local nursing home in the place of one Bernard Greer. The arrangement suits him: warm meals, a roof, and a whole new cast of people to quietly, relentlessly love. But Denise, a caregiver at the facility whose marriage is quietly crumbling, notices something is off about “Bernard” — because Fred can’t help leaving kindness like a trail of breadcrumbs wherever he goes. What unfolds is a novel about grief, forgiveness, found family, and the radical act of choosing to show up for people who have forgotten how to show up for themselves.

Let’s talk about the book:

Frederick Fife walked into my ears and set up permanent residence in my chest. I did not see him coming. I queued up this audiobook expecting something gentle and life-affirming. The kind of story you put on while you fold laundry and feel vaguely good about humanity. What I did NOT expect was to be stopped cold, undone, ugly-crying into a throw pillow at what I can only describe as one of the most quietly devastating scenes I have encountered in literary fiction in years.

It is the kind of writing that makes you put down whatever you’re doing (or in my case, rip out an earbud and just SIT there) because the truth of it lands so hard you need a moment to breathe around it. Anna Johnston, I do not know under what rock I was living to not have found you sooner, but I am here now and I am NOT leaving.

And then there is Tim Carroll. When I say he EMBODIED Frederick Fife. I mean they became one person. There was no separation between narrator and character, no performance, no artifice. Tim Carroll simply WAS Fred: the gentle cadence, the old-world warmth, the quiet dignity of a man who gives everything he has and asks for nothing back. Listening to this audiobook is, I would argue, the superior way to experience it. The voice IS Frederick Fife.

And as for the ending! I have a very specific policy about perfect endings, which is that if you change so much as a comma, I will find you. This ending earns every single thing it asks you to feel. It is the only ending this story could have had, and Anna Johnston knew exactly what she was doing.

Would I recommend it?

OBSESSED. Send help. Frederick Fife is the literary father figure none of us knew we needed, and this novel is a gut-punch wrapped in the warmest hug you’ll ever receive. Tim Carroll’s narration turns an already extraordinary book into something transcendent. This is a gem in literary fiction. The kind you press into someone’s hands (or earbuds) and say trust me with your whole chest. A perfect five stars, and I would give it six if the scale allowed.

Read Next!

If The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife wrecked you in the best possible way, here’s where to go next:

• The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes — If what you loved was the found family thread, the way strangers become the people who save you, and a story told with tremendous heart and zero sentimentality, this one belongs on your list.
• A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman — The most natural comp: a gruff, lonely man whose fierce love for people he pretends not to care about becomes a whole community’s salvation. If Fred is who you want in your corner, Ove is his spiritual cousin.
• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt — An unlikely friendship, grief processed sideways, and a narrator who sees the people around him with devastating clarity. The emotional DNA is identical.
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig — Another novel about unlived lives, regret, and discovering that the life you have is more valuable than you knew. If Fred’s quiet philosophy of living moved you, this one will too.
• Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman — Found family, a character who has learned not to need people as a form of self-protection, and a story that slowly, carefully dismantles that armour. The emotional arc rhymes with Fred’s journey in the best way.

Have you met a FRED?

Because I think most of us have — that one person who showed up so quietly and so completely that you didn’t realize how much they were holding for you until you stopped to look. Did a book ever give you THAT person? Tell me everything in the comments. I need to know I’m not alone in this.

Book Links

Want to purchase this or any of your favourite books while supporting a local bookstore? Consider purchasing using the sites below — these sites work with independent local bookstore owners to fulfil your book orders. #SupportLocal

Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org
Follow Anna Johnston for more such brilliant writing
Check out more books from William Morrow