The Swedish word is dostadning, and it means putting your own house in order while you are still well enough to enjoy the deciding. Margareta Magnusson, who gives her age as somewhere between eighty and one hundred, is blunt about why it matters: the boxes you never open become someone else's grief work, usually your children's, usually in the worst week of their lives.

What makes this the rare organising book people finish is that it is not really an organising book. It is short, funny and unsentimental, and it moves between practical rules (start with the wardrobe, leave the photographs for last, never begin with a box of letters) and small stories about the objects themselves. The New York Times called it a fond and wise little book, and the Washington Post read it as the anti Marie Kondo: less spark, more responsibility.

Scribner publishes it at 128 pages in paper over board, which makes it a single evening's read and a decade's worth of nudge. It is also, awkwardly and by design, one of the most useful things you can give a parent.