“Like fellow Scandinavian Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, to which it’s been compared, the Swedish writer Sandgren’s Collected Works exerts a hypnotic pull on the reader over its hundreds of pages . . . Sandgren probes questions of gender, success, and ambition, creating a portrait of a man and a woman fundamentally at odds that keeps its reader spellbound.”
—Rhian Sasseen, The Atlantic
“[Collected Works] has flavours of the realism of her countryman, Karl Ove Knausgard, more than a hint of emotional American big hitters like Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, and something of the twists and turns of a chronicle like War and Peace.”
—India Lewis, The Arts Desk (UK)
“Collected Works has been put together with the care of a medieval scribe and the patient skill of a master carver. It is without doubt one of the most meticulously built works of fiction I’ve read in a long time.”
—Charlie Connelly, The New European (UK)
“This is the 600-page Swedish debut novel I will be pressing into everyone’s hands this spring. Don’t be alarmed! The pages frankly fly by—in fact, I wish there were more”
—Lit Hub
“The mystery at the heart of the story adds urgency to this warm, engaging, and funny novel about the inebriation of youth and the sobriety of middle age; about lives shaped by art and ideas; about our human flaws and joys. Collected Works is a thoroughly enjoyable book.”
—Aysegül Savas, author of Walking on the Ceiling
“Sandgren hooks the reader with an absorbing, multilayered plot that shifts between past and present, building slowly towards the emotional and narrative mystery at its heart.”
—Anne Foley, Booklist
“[An] absorbing story . . . [Collected Works] is a witty, toothy, family saga, unashamedly intellectual but rarely bogged down by the weight of its theories . . . It’s refreshing to read such a confidently ambitious work that holds art, literature, and philosophy close to its heart . . . Collected Works is an assured, bittersweet novel that, like youth, seems to have it all—energy, aspiration, and self-delusion.”
—Catherine Taylor, Financial Times
“Lydia Sandgren’s Collected Works is the most convincing work of literary fiction I’ve read in years: one part family saga, one part buddy comedy, one part mystery, one part bildungsroman, and one part philosophical inquiry into the nature of art, the whole filled with unforgettable characters, wry humor, and knock-down gorgeous sentences, positively vibrating with intelligence and style. People often write, with varying degrees of accuracy, that new books feel destined to become classics, but Collected Works feels like it already is one—and you, lucky reader, have stumbled upon it.”
—Emily Temple, author of The Lightness
QUICK VIEW
