Täby Municipality is one of the places through which the novel charts the night the dead return. Its scenes move between Elvy and Flora’s domestic life and the public disturbance at Taby Church, where seven old people emerge from a mortuary. The contrast makes the municipality more than a timestamp: ordinary rooms and familiar routines share the same unfolding crisis as the cemetery, while the timeline anchors both in a specific local setting.

Setting and narrative function

The novel identifies Täby Municipality through time-and-place markers rather than extended description. The label appears beside scenes at 21.05, 23.20, and 00.52, placing episodes from the night within a sequence that continues past midnight. These markers give the local events a measured chronology: the reader encounters not a single generalized report of the dead returning, but moments unfolding in identifiable places and at particular times.

The municipality’s significance is therefore partly structural. Its domestic scenes sit within a wider emergency that is becoming visible through reports, institutional responses, and public images. The narration does not supply a comprehensive portrait of Täby or explain its boundaries; instead, it lets a home, a bedroom, and a cemetery carry the setting’s human and civic dimensions.

Domestic scenes during the crisis

At 21.05, Elvy is watching television with Flora. She asks Flora to turn it off because the groaning is too much for her head. Flora agrees and saves what she is watching. The exchange is small and practical, but it places the strain of the night inside a familiar household routine: the television can be switched off, even as events outside that room become increasingly difficult to contain.

At 23.20, Elvy prepares the bed in Tore’s former room for Flora. The hospital smell has been softened by almond-oil soap and detergent, but Elvy has removed every remnant of the bed in which Tore died: the mattress, pillows, and linen were discarded the day after his death and replaced. Flora has no objection to sleeping there. She knew her grandfather and is not frightened by him. The room thus holds two conditions at once: Elvy’s effort to clear away the physical traces of death, and Flora’s acceptance of a place still marked by the person who died in it.

A later marker, 00.52, accompanies a moment after Flora has finished a telephone call. She looks as if she has seen a ghost and goes to the bedroom door to listen. Elvy asks whether the call went well and whether Flora was believed. The detail links communication with uncertainty: whatever has been said over the phone matters to the women inside the home, but the scene leaves the call’s outcome unresolved in this passage.

The cemetery and public recognition

The municipality’s crisis also reaches Taby Church’s cemetery. At 23.26, retired nature photographer Nils Lundstrom takes a picture of seven old people in shrouds staggering out of the mortuary and heading for the exit. The gravestones in the frame make the location unmistakable, while the group’s movement reverses the expected order of the place: those who had been laid among the dead are now leaving the mortuary on foot.

The photograph is set to dominate the front page of Expressen the next day. Its importance lies not only in what it shows, but in how a local sight becomes public evidence. The scene shifts the return of the dead from scattered reports into an image capable of confronting a much wider audience. At the same time, the people in the picture remain old individuals in shrouds, not an abstract phenomenon; the cemetery preserves the intimate and disturbing scale of what has happened even as the news spreads.

Meaning within the wider emergency

The entries associated with Täby Municipality place private grief beside public alarm without making either one disappear into the other. In Elvy’s home, a replaced mattress, clean linen, and a television switched off are ways of managing immediate discomfort and loss. At the church cemetery, the seven figures and their photograph expose the crisis beyond the household. These different settings show how the same night presses into domestic space and public life.

The municipality’s strongest narrative effect comes from that contrast and from the timing that binds its episodes together. The household scenes occur amid the same night as the cemetery emergence, and the post-midnight marker shows the account continuing as people try to respond. Täby is thus rendered not through broad geography but through a succession of concrete locations where death becomes newly present: a room prepared for sleep, a bedroom door approached to listen, and a cemetery exit through which the dead have begun to pass.