Quick Take
- Narration: Irene Repeto handles Backman’s ensemble Spanish-language edition with the emotional range the novel requires, this is material that moves between comedy and grief, and the narration keeps pace with both.
- Themes: Community loyalty, the politics of sports fandom, violence and its aftermath in small-town life
- Mood: Intense and emotionally demanding, with warmth at the center
- Verdict: A powerful continuation of the Beartown story, English-language listeners should note this is the Spanish edition and verify the recording before purchasing.
Fredrik Backman writes about hockey the way certain novelists write about the sea: as a force that organizes the lives of everyone near it, demanding things that have nothing to do with the sport itself and everything to do with what people need to believe about themselves. I came to Beartown late, reading the first novel on a long weekend when I had run out of excuses not to, and found myself more shaken than I expected to be. Us Against You is the continuation, and it carries the weight of everything the first book established.
Before anything else, the same note that applies to other entries in this batch: this audiobook is in Spanish. Irene Repeto narrates the Spanish-language edition, and the synopsis is presented in Spanish with an English translation. If you are looking for the English-language audiobook of Us Against You, this is not the recording you want. Seek out the English version, narrated by Marin Ireland, for the original-language experience.
What Beartown Is Actually About
The Green Valley News called Backman the Dickens of our time, and while that kind of blurb is easy to dismiss, it points at something real about how Backman constructs a small-town community. Beartown is a place defined by its hockey club, not in the cheerful civic sense, but in the sense that the club is the organizing principle of every hierarchy, every grudge, every aspiration and disappointment in the town. When the club is threatened in Us Against You, the town fractures along lines that were already there, waiting for the pressure.
The novel picks up after the events of Beartown and follows the team’s reformation around a new set of players: Amat, described as the fastest skater anyone has seen; Benji, the intense lone wolf who carries secrets; Bobo, whose eagerness to please masks real complexity; and Vidar, the born-troublemaker whose arc is one of the book’s most surprising developments. Half the Beartown players have defected to Hed, the rival town, which means every game carries the weight of personal betrayal and civic war. This is how Backman uses sports, not as backdrop but as the specific mechanism through which everything else is negotiated.
The Tragedy That Reframes Everything
The synopsis mentions a terrible tragedy shortly before the decisive match that forces both towns to question whether their sport can ever feel innocent again. Backman is careful not to let this function as a twist, it arrives with the weight of something that has been building from the first pages. His novels do not traffic in surprise so much as inevitability, the sense that events were always going to arrive here, that the community’s choices made this outcome possible. Whether that constitutes hope or despair is one of the questions the novel leaves genuinely open.
Irene Repeto’s narration manages this tonal complexity with skill. The novel’s humor, and there is humor, most of it dark, some of it genuinely warm, is delivered without undercutting the grief that sits underneath the text. Backman writes comedy and tragedy in the same breath, and a narrator who can hold both simultaneously is essential to making the books work. Repeto does this.
Series Position and What to Read First
Us Against You is the second Beartown novel and cannot be listened to independently, the first novel establishes the assault that sits at the center of the series’ moral architecture, and without that context the emotional stakes of the continuation are significantly reduced. Read or listen to Beartown first. The third volume, The Winners, completes the trilogy. For Spanish-language listeners, Backman translates excellently, his prose style is deceptively simple, the sentences short and declarative in a way that moves cleanly between languages.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
Listen to this if you read in Spanish, have already listened to or read Beartown, and are ready for a continuation that goes to more difficult places than the first book. Skip this if you want the English-language version, seek out Marin Ireland’s recording instead. Also skip if you haven’t read Beartown: this is not a second-entry-friendly series.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the Spanish-language edition of Us Against You, and where can I find the English version?
Yes, this is entirely in Spanish, narrated by Irene Repeto. For the English audiobook, look for the Macmillan Audio edition narrated by Marin Ireland.
Can Us Against You be listened to without reading Beartown first?
No. The first novel establishes the central trauma and the relationships that Us Against You builds from. Starting here would significantly diminish the emotional impact of both books.
How much does hockey knowledge affect the listening experience?
Very little. Backman uses hockey as a vehicle for examining community, loyalty, and identity, the sport functions as context rather than subject matter. Non-hockey readers navigate these books without difficulty.
Is the tragedy in this book connected to the assault from Beartown, or is it a separate event?
The novel’s tragedy is a separate event, though the community’s capacity to respond to it is shaped by how it handled, or failed to handle, the events of the first book. The two are thematically connected.
