Böcker av Lydia Sandgren

In the long run, it was impossible to hide the fact that Cecilia had one day decided to leave her children and her husband, to take off and never come back. Martin Berg is slowly falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer who'd almost finished his novel, his girlfriend was the wildly intelligent and beautiful Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the up-and-coming artist Gustav

'Meet Sweden's Sally Rooney' The Times'A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble'Telegraph'Thrilling, brilliant and immense in the best possible way... teeming with ideas and digressions on literature, art, history and love' Francesca Reece, author of Voyeur'Compelling, tense and moving - I loved this smart and subtle exploration of modern motherhood and womanhood' Daisy Buchanan, author of Insatiable'Vibrating with intelligence and style' Emily Temple, author of The Lightness________________In the long run, it was impossible to hide the fact that Cecilia had one day decided to leave her children and her husband, to take off and never come back. Martin Berg is slowly falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer who'd almost finished his novel, his girlfriend was the wildly intelligent and beautiful Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the up-and-coming artist Gustav Becker. But Martin's manuscript has long been languishing in a desk drawer, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia has been missing for years - ever since she vanished from his life, leaving him to raise their two young children alone. So who was Cecilia? Martin's eccentric wife, Gustav's enigmatic muse, an absent mother - a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Martin's daughter Rakel stumbles across a clue about what happened to her mother, she becomes determined to fill in the gaps in her family's story. But she can't escape the simple question at the heart of it all: How can anyone leave someone they love?________________'[Collected Works] will suck you in and refuse to let go' LitHub'A richly evocative work from a major new talent' Kirkus Reviews'A sweeping and complex drama of family, art and sacrifice... Readers will be captivated' Publishers Weekly'[A] warm, engaging and funny novel about the inebriation of youth and the sobriety of middle age... a thoroughly enjoyable book' Aysegÿl Savas, author of White on White

"A witty, toothy, family saga, unashamedly intellectual . . . that, like youth, seems to have it all—energy, aspiration, and self-delusion." —Catherine Taylor, Financial Times"MEET SWEDEN'S SALLY ROONEY" —The Times of London"A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble." —The Telegraph of London"Poised at the intersection of life and art, reality and imagination, [Collected Works] blends the thrill of mystery with the curiosity and depth of philosophical inquiry." —The New Yorker"Collected Works . . . is as insatiable in its read as it is insightful to modern challenges of family, memory, and finding purpose." —Matthew Bedard, Flaunt"[A] sweeping and complex drama of family, art, and sacrifice . . . Readers will be captivated." —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review"A richly evocative work from a major new talent." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review A compelling mystery and poignant bildungsroman for readers of Karl Ove Knausgård, Collected Works is a novel about love, power, and art—and what leads us to make the pivotal decisions that change the course of our lives.Martin Berg’s wife, Cecilia, disappeared years ago. His memories of their carefree college days seem ever out of reach, and the intellectual curiosities that once made him the object of her desire have given way to midlife uncertainty. The methodical and quiet life he’s made for himself and his adult children couldn’t be further from the one he dreamed of in his youth, when the manuscripts lying around his apartment were flush with promise and his ailing publishing house was still new.Perhaps nothing reminds Martin of these failures more than his friend Gustav Becker, a wildly successful painter who’s returned to Gothenburg on the eve of his career-defining retrospective. Gustav, meanwhile, is hurting too. His obsession with Cecilia’s inexplicable disappearance had made his art hagiographic, fixated on her image. When posters for Gustav’s retrospective plaster Cecilia’s face on major billboards across the city, Martin’s daughter Rakel learns a haunting fact that points toward her mother’s whereabouts. She and her brother chase this clue across time, memory, and Europe to discover why Cecilia abandoned her family, with the imagined hope that the question of what makes a person leave can ever be answered.Collected Works, a major hit in Sweden, sold over 100,000 copies in its first year in print, instantly making Lydia Sandgren a literary sensation. Winner of the 2020 August Prize for Fiction, the novel is set to publish in 17 territories.