'Eminently readable and engrossing' - Spectator
'A wide-ranging exploration of family and friends, art and ambition that more than lives up to the hype' - Marie Claire
'A remarkable, addictive and quietly subversive work that... will have you demanding even more time with its characters' - Irish Business Post
Martin Berg is slowly falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer who'd almost finished his novel, his girlfriend was the shockingly 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. Not long after they were married, she vanished from his life and left 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.
Collected Works is a captivating, characterful and witty novel that asks searching questions about motherhood, family relationships, the stories that we tell ourselves and those that we inherit.
'Utterly gripping... like the films of Richard Linklater transmuted to the page... a magnificent doorstop of a novel' - Guardian
'A witty, toothy, family saga... a confidently ambitious work that holds art, literature and philosophy close to its heart... an assured, bittersweet novel that, like youth, seems to have it all' - Financial Times
'Meet Sweden's Sally Rooney . . . a love-triangle, arty chit-chat, and lots of snow and sex' - The Times
'A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble . . . a novel to savour' - Telegraph
About the Author
Lydia Sandgren is the eldest of seven siblings brought up in the west of Sweden. She has studied music, philosophy, and is a practising psychologist today, living in Gothenburg. Collected Works is her debut novel; it won the highly prestigious August Prize in 2020 and has sold over 100,000 copies.
Industry Reviews
'The hottest debut of the year! If Klas Ostergren and Donna Tartt had had a love child, who grew up in Gothenburg and became an author, well, there you have Lydia Sandgren' - Akademibokhandeln
'A masterpiece, just as bold as any Donna Tartt novel, but at the same time calm and precise... Everything is captured. Tender, and terribly convincing' - Expressen
'Lydia Sandgren has written this year's most talked about - perhaps the millennium's most talked about - debut' - Dagens Nyheter
'Neat as in a perfectly composed pop song - catchy, bombastic, irresistable...What's left to say, therefore, is just that we hope that it doesn't take another ten years for Sandgren to write her next book' - Weekendavisen (Denmark)
'Lydia Sandgren is a debut author, but she writes this novel as if she's done nothing else for decades' - Svenska Dagbladet
