Collected Works stretches over a 30-year time period and appears as a filigree tale with luminous characters. Through the novel Lydia Sandgren expresses an homage to the love of literature, art and philosophy.” 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 Met nog meer memorabele anekdotes, meer humor en de vinger wat vaker op de deleteknop had Sandgren een waar meesterwerk kunnen beitelen uit dit veelbelovende debuut. Niettemin is ‘Verzamelde werken’ zo’n boek waarvan de personages je vrienden lijken te worden, zo’n boek dat de omgeving doet vervagen, zodat je al lezende de tram mist of tegen een paal aan loopt. Wedden dat er over twintig jaar debuten verschijnen met een wikkel waarop staat: ‘De nieuwe Lydia Sandgren is geboren.’? 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? In a move that’s more reminiscent of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s 2019 novel Fleishman is in Trouble than, say, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it’s not so much her disappearance that’s the source of the mystery here, but rather Cecilia herself. In fact, for much of the book, Collected Works reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman, about a divorced Manhattan physician whose ex-wife, Rachel, the mother of his children, goes missing. Just swap those ­hedge-fund managers and their Upper East Side social-climbing for artists and intellectuals musing on Wittgenstein and drinking very good coffee. But while that novel allowed the reader to see events from Rachel’s point of view, here Cecilia remains enigmatic till the bitter end.

That was many years ago now, during a period when he’d spent a lot of time with a fairly pleasant graphic designer. She kept dragging him to open houses, possibly to demonstrate her independence. “I’ve been thinking about buying a flat,” she’d say, and Martin could never figure out whether she was trying to communicate something else. Either way, there was always something wrong with the flats they went to see. One was on the ground floor, one had a dark-green kitchen. Too expensive, too small, too new. While she talked to estate agents about pipes and balconies, Martin strolled around other people’s homes, staged to make them look like someone-lives-here-but-not-quite, amusing himself by trying to identify the algorithms of the open house. There were always pots of fresh herbs with the price tag still on in the kitchens. Certain kinds of cushions had always been placed just so on the sofas. A tealight always burned on the bathroom sink.The novel has the feel of one of Gustav’s mag­nificent oils; layer upon layer of careful brush strokes and colour that amount to something close to photorealism. […] Sandgren has a sly eye for ­comedy […] A novel to savour” Reading this novel has been a tremendous pleasure, and Lydia Sandgren has obviously enjoyed writing it. A great novel.”

Martin lives in Gothenburg; he has a teenage son, Elis, and a daughter, university student Rakel ("tertiary education seemed to be what she was made for"), currently studying psychology. The novel] is about friendship and love, art and literature, and about a woman and the family in which she leaves a gaping hole when she disappears. Monumental!”It's a promising premise for a novel, a mystery that Sandgren builds her novel around from two sides: events leading up to it (albeit focused more on Martin than Cecilia) and then the situation fifteen years later. Collected Works is simply an outstanding, remarkable, noteworthy debut – I actually can’t think of more superlatives right now!” Granted, we spend a great deal of the novel in their youth, and who among us can say we were not absolutely insufferable in our teens and early 20s? These three, however, and the two men in particular, never shake off their pretentiousness, self-absorption and intellectual snobbery. Each the product of privilege – they’re all from rich families with Gustav effectively funded by a distant yet wealthy grandmother – the men in particular while away their prime years getting steaming drunk in bars and at parties jousting with equally insufferable youths over art, philosophy and literature. Offering a reader upward of a quarter of a million words is a big ask, not least in this attention-sapping, time-scarce epoch with countless distractions tugging constantly at our sleeves. A writer must be sure of themselves and sure-footed enough in their writing to pull off a book of this kind of length. No, Martin told himself. It never was. He shook his legs one at a time to regain control over them. As soon as the woman turned around, any similarity would be gone. Look, now she’s moving . . .