Ove tries to buy an iPad at a department store, fails (the salesperson is incompetent), and complains. He is fifty-nine, recently fired, and three months since his wife died. He is introduced as a man with principles and contempt for people who lack them.

Ove's morning routine: he inspects the residential area, checks locks, tickets improperly parked cars, and returns home to the silence Sonja has left behind. The present scenes begin to alternate with glimpses of his past.

The first sustained flashback to Ove's childhood. His father works the railways. His mother dies early. He grows up learning to fix things, to do them correctly, and to believe that a man's worth is in his work and his word.

Parvaneh and Patrick back a trailer into Ove's mailbox. Ove is furious. Parvaneh is unapologetic, warm, and entirely unintimidated. She will become the novel's second protagonist and the engine of Ove's rescue.

Past: Ove, sixteen and newly fatherless, finds a job at the railway. He saves carefully, buys a suit, and attends a function where he realizes the suit is wrong. A small humiliation in an early life full of quiet humiliations.

Present: Ove attempts suicide again; is interrupted by Jimmy, an overweight neighbor who has locked himself out of his house. Ove helps him with furious efficiency. The cat continues to appear.

Past: The most important chapter in the novel. Ove meets Sonja on a train to Spain following the fire that destroyed everything he owned. She is reading, drops a book, and the rest of his life begins.

Present: Ove takes the stray cat to the vet. He protests the entire way. He pays the bill. He refers to the cat as 'the cat' and not his cat. Everyone can see that it is his cat.

Past and present intersect: the history of Ove's feud with his neighbor Rune — once a friend, now an adversary. Present: Anita, Rune's wife, approaches Ove for help stopping the council from putting Rune in a care home.

Past: The accident that puts Sonja in a wheelchair. The hospital's bureaucratic refusal to let her continue teaching. Ove's response: he fights every official, files every form, appears at every desk until the system bends.

Present: Patrick needs a radiator fixed. Ove teaches him, with minimal patience and maximum precision. The lesson is practical and implicitly something more.

Past: Sonja's cancer diagnosis. The final years of their marriage. Ove's refusal to accept that the thing he cannot fix is happening. The last morning — and what he did every day at her grave since.

Present: Ove drives a young man, Mirsad, to the bus station after his family rejects him for being gay. He helps a young journalist having a panic attack. The neighborhood is beginning to understand that Ove is the person they call in a crisis.

Present and future: Ove helps Parvaneh deliver her baby. The council abandons its efforts against Rune. Ove does not die by his own hand. Years later, he dies in his bed, as an old man, surrounded by the people his stubbornness and love accumulated. The whole street comes to his funeral.