Wilful Disregard: A Novel About Love - Hardcover

Andersson, Lena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1447268911 ISBN 13: 9781447268918

Publisher: Picador, 2015

Synopsis

Ester Nilsson is a sensible person in a sensible relationship.

Until the day she is asked to give a lecture on famous artist Hugo Rask. The man himself sits in the audience, spellbound, and, when the two meet afterwards, he has the same effect on her.

From now on Ester's existence is intrinsically linked to this conversation, and the chain of events that unravels will change Ester's life.

Wilful Disregard is a kind of dark love story, it is a story of total and desperate devotion and about how willingly we betray ourselves in our longing to be loved.

About this title

About the Author

Lena Andersson (b. 1970) is a novelist and columnist for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's largest morning paper. She lives in Stockholm where she is considered one of the country's sharpest contemporary analysts. Wilful Disregard is her fifth novel and won Sweden's prestigious August Prize.

Review

Alas, most women have lived this story. Though few will have told it so well. Compelling and keenly observant. -- Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin Love, famously, is blind. People in love can lose even the most basic critical faculties and become capable of monumental self-deception. Hardly a new story, but I don't think I've ever seen this particular myopia as astutely and entertainingly explored as in this stunning novel ... bruise-tender in its detail and emotional candour. This is a slim volume, but every word packs a punch; every other sentence is so wise and funny that it begs to be quoted. Andersson's gift for conjuring atmosphere and emotion out of small quotidian mishaps is extraordinary' -- Julie Myerson Guardian Lena Andersson's Wilful Disregard is a story of the heart written with bracing intellectual rigor. It is a stunner, pure and simple. -- Alice Sebold, author of THE LOVELY BONES Dry wit and sharp insight ... If she sees an intellectual pretension, she pricks it The Economist A compelling read, a deeply philosophical book that attempts to make sense of love in the modern world Irish Examiner Brilliant and unflinching on obsession, on desperation, on the stuff of how people are capable of being to each other. Andersson writes smart, sharp-eyed, and often witheringly funny prose; nobody gets out of this situation with their pride, or their public persona, intact. Which is what makes it such addictive reading. -- Belinda McKeon, author of SOLACE and TENDER A creepy lucid dissection of the tangled psychology of love. M Magazine Lean and compulsively readable ... Andersson's sketching of the lovesick Ester and the preoccupied Hugo is so well done that every incensed text she sends him is another little piece of our collective heart as we follow a struggle that has existed for as long as human life: the lover and the loved. Kirkus

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1447268911
• ISBN 13: 9781447268918
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208