The Accidental Adventures of the 100 Year Old Man is a follow up book to The 100 Year Old Man Who Jumped Out of the Window, written by Jonas Jonasson and you can find my earlier review of that book by clicking the title link. I “read” this book in Audible format, something I am finding a great help these days as my concentration wobbles a bit as I recover from prostate surgery.

The book picks up exactly where the previous one ended, Alan Carlsson and his younger friend (72 years) Julius living a life of luxury in Indonesia. But Alan is bored, not surprising since despite his advanced age he has had an adventurous life meeting Stalin, Mao, Churchill and others as he “solved” their nuclear weapons problems! He acquires an iPad which becomes addictive and opens his eyes to things going on around the world, which he suddenly realises he cares about.

Now Julius is also getting bored, he needs something to do before he gets depressed.

Sitting in the hotel bar drinking arak, Julius notices an Asian man also drinking arak sitting near him. They come together, drink more and introduce each other ….. Simran Chakrabati who, on Julius’s advice, decided to change his name to Gustav Svenson, and leave the hotel without paying! Together they take over an asparagus farm and sell it as Swedish asparagus, which may seem like an incidental event, but which is central to the forthcoming adventures.

In a few days time, noticing Alan’s boredom, Julius has a birthday surprise for him of a hot air balloon ride, with champagne and sandwiches! Needless to say, the balloon sets off by accident, crash lands in the Indian Ocean, and …………they are rescued by a North Korean ship carrying uranium!

You really couldn’t make this up, but somehow the author has done just that! This now sets the scene for the whole book which progresses like this; Travel to North Korea, eventually stealing the uranium; arriving in America, playing golf with Trump, offloading the uranium to Angela Merkel; Going home to Sweden and starting a coffin and seance business, getting involved with uranium again and travelling to Tanzania and Kenya as they finally create a “stable” asparagus business. It is at this point that Alan, the 101year old man gets bored with his iPad for global news and discovers …….. Twitter!

I enjoyed this sequel, but not as much as the first book where the characters were new, the events were ridiculously hilarious, and it made me laugh a lot. Listening to it via Audible with headphones annoyed my wife as I kept laughing out aloud. This book was very funny in parts, the balloon take off, landing and rescue; the round of golf with Donald Trump; the coffin business …… all made me laugh. But other sections seemed to drag on a bit and by now, knowing Alan’s character it was just about possible to guess what would be the outcome in each scenario. Overall however I think the author has done a good job with such a difficult subject matter to find new adventures.

Categories: books

Tags: Audible, Book addict, book lover, book reviews, books, books holic