'HOW CAN ANYONE LEAVE SOMEONE THEY LOVE?'Martin Berg is falling into crisis. Decades ago, he was an aspiring writer, his girlfriend was the wildly intelligent Cecilia Wickner, and his best friend was the hellraising artist Gustav Becker. But Martin's manuscript is now languishing in a drawer, Gustav has stopped answering his calls, and Cecilia has vanished - leaving him to raise their children alone.Cecilia: an eccentric wife and absent mother, a woman who was perhaps only true to herself. When Rakel stumbles across a clue as to why her mother left, she sets out to fill the gaps in her family's story and discovers that some questions have no clear answers...

'Collected Works absorbed me and wouldn't let me go. A novel of the first-order-sprawling, searching, funny, sad, and incredibly smart. Sandgren has written a masterpiece that lays claim to the totality of modern life. A novel to make the world believe in fiction again.' - Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans