Allan
Karlsson is about to celebrate his hundredth birthday, and a party is planned
at his retirement home. Allan is alert despite his age, but is not interested
in attending the party. Instead he climbs out the window and disappears. He
walks in his slippers to the nearest bus station, intending to travel as far as
his available cash will allow. While at the bus station, he meets an angry
young man with a suitcase so big that he can't get into the lavatory and take
it with him. He desperately asks Allan to hold the case for him and wait.
Within half a minute, Allan's bus arrives and Allan boards it, taking the
suitcase with him onto the bus. However, the young man misses the bus. The
suitcase turns out to be stuffed with drug dealers' money; Karlsson is chased
by the dealers trying to recover their lost cash. Meanwhile, the retirement
home calls the police to search for Allan. The police have no knowledge of the
money and are only looking for Allan, who is known to be somewhat absent
minded. However, Allan is simply trying to escape his retirement home
confinement. He gets caught up in criminal activity by accident and ends up,
unknown to him, being hunted by both the police and a gang of murderous
criminals.
While
dealing with Karlsson's adventures as a centenarian, the novel also provides
flashbacks to increasingly fantastic episodes from his long life. As it
proceeds, we learn that Karlsson had helped to make the atom bomb, became good
friends with Harry S. Truman and General Franco, knew Stalin, Kim Jong-il, Mao
Tse-tung, and Soong Mei-ling, hung out with Albert Einstein's less intelligent
brother, foiled an assassination plot against Winston Churchill, and was a
participant behind the scenes in many of the key events of the twentieth
century.
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