Anna Johnston

Fiction 2024 | 327 pages

If you can get past the incredulous premise of the opening pages of the book, you will find a sweet, delightful and insightful novel about people's relationships, life in a nursing home, dementia, families, grief, and joy.  Above all, joy.

So here is the context.  Impoverished Fred Fife is at a neighborhood park on the day he is ousted out of his apartment for failure to pay his rent.  He sees a man in a wheelchair who appears dead.  He investigates and discovers the man is in fact dead.  As he attempts to wheel him over to the group of people Fred assumes this guy is with … an outing from the Wattle River Retirement home ...  Fred trips, hits his head, and the man, Bernard Greer, falls out of the wheelchair and into the river.  Fred watches with his mouth agape as Bernard’s body floats downstream.

One of the caregivers arrives and sees Fred sitting aside the wheelchair.  She helps him back in.  Turns out Bernard and Fred look so much alike, it never occurs to anyone that the man in the wheelchair is not Bernard.  Fred tries to tell the caregivers over and over that he is not the man who was in the wheelchair, but Bernard's dementia has developed so far that no one believes him.  They all assume Bernard is off again on one of his delusional stories.  Next thing Fred knows, he wakes up in Bernard's bed in the retirement home.

Johnston manages to write this whole story as a comedy of errors, seeming to laugh at herself as well as her characters.

Fred is now ensconced in the retirement home, wracked with guilt for living on someone else's dime and trying his best to tell the truth, but he is never successful.  There are some changes in "Bernard."  Not only does his dementia seem to be gone, but so is his incontinence.  And his personality has changed radically from a grump to the kindest, most compassionate, and loving man.  The caregivers scratch their heads but never doubt his veracity.

From there Fred/Bernard's story unfolds as he makes friends, continues to grieve the death of his wife Dawn, and then discovers that Bernard has an estranged daughter, Hannah.  But you will learn more about his evolving life when you read The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife.

I recommend this easy and enjoyable debut novel and wonder what Anna Johnston will write next from her home in Melbourne, Australia.

March 2026