Collected Works: A Novel: 'A wry bestseller that reads like the effortlessly chic European cousin of Fleishman is in Trouble' (Telegraph)

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Novels are often described as being “crafted” and it’s usually just as a handy synonym for “written”, but Collected Works has been put together with the care of a medieval scribe and the patient skill of a master carver. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Without everything being tied up neatly, the novel doesn't offer easy satisfaction in its end, but that's not what Sandgren ever was after; so also the novel's bulk was to a purpose -- indeed, in some sense is its purpose. 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. Like Martin's own 'collected works' there's an intentionally fragmented and unfinished feel to Collected Works -- reflecting life itself, after all, as it does not usually proceed or unwind in the neatest and most predictable way.Thirty-three-year-old Cecilia Berg, mother of two and promising scholar, had vanished without a trace. He has only a single publication credit to his name, in an anthology "of promising writers born in the sixties". Hoewel de Zweedse meer een verhalenverteller dan een woordkunstenaar is, kan ze de zaken met weinig opsmuk (een nacht is ‘intens Van Gogh-blauw’, een vrouw heeft ‘een Da Vinci- Cecilia's life certainly seems more interesting than Martin's -- even before she left (and at least there are some glimpses of some of her formative experiences) -- but Martin's story is an often entertaining one, complete with year-abroad in France in his youth (with Gustav) and a variety of interesting experiences.

Sandgren writes her story well, and Collected Works is consistently engaging, but there could have been even more to it. Part bildungsroman, part psychological mystery and part family saga, Collected Works largely delivers on its grand ambition. Sandgren is great on detail (.....) 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. (...) One thing I wouldn’t call this book, though, is propulsive. It proceeds at a leisurely, unhurried -- some might even say self-indulgent -- pace. It’s a novel to savour, not to tear through, and for this reason alone, I can’t honestly say that I loved it. " - Lucy Scholes, The Telegraph 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 their beloved mother abandoned her family, with the imagined hope that the question of what makes a person can ever be answered. Collected Works is thrilling, brilliant and immense in the best possible way. Sandgren is a master storyteller, and I feel utterly bereft to have left the world of her absorbing characters. In a time of grim insularity, this is an uncompromisingly European novel, teeming with ideas and digressions on literature, art, history and love. Truly joyful. I can’t wait to re-read this book.”

Collected Works

It was just a few weeks after she had successfully defended her doctoral thesis, and the plan had been for her to take up a position as a lecturer in the department the following autumn. 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 Eleven!” Mimmi said and pulled on him to make him move. “What’s the matter with you? It’s not one of the buildings sinking into the mud, is it?” Admirably, Sandgren doesn't opt for the easy course in the end: there is at least one surprising and very big turn, but the novel's build-up isn't to a simple resolution but rather a much more open-ended one.