Acts of Infidelity A Novel

Like diving into the mind of a brilliant, infuriating friend, this novel dissects the experience of "the other woman" with tremendous wit and insight.

When Ester Nilsson meets the actor Olof Sten, she falls madly in love. Olof makes no secret of being married, but he and Ester nevertheless start to meet regularly and begin a strange dance of courtship. Olof insists he doesn't plan to leave his wife, but he doesn't object to this new situation either...it's far too much fun.

Ester, on the other hand, is convinced that things might change. But as their relationship continues over repeated summers apart, and winters full of heated meetings in bars, she is forced to realize the truth: Ester Nilsson has become a mistress.

Ester's and Olof's entanglements and arguments are the stuff of relationship nightmares. Cutting, often cruel, and written with piercing humor, Acts of Infidelity is clever, painful, maddening, but most of all perfectly, precisely true.

Lena Andersson is a columnist for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest morning paper. Considered one of the country’s sharpest contemporary analysts, she writes about politics, society, culture, religion, and other topics. Her fifth novel and English-language debut, Willful Disregard, was awarded the 2013 August Prize, Sweden’s highest literary honor.

Saskia Vogel is from Los Angeles and lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. Her 2019 debut novel, Permission, has been translated into four languages. She has written on themes of gender, power and the art of translation for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, and The Paris Review Daily. Her translations include work by Lina Wolff, Katrine Marçal, Karolina Ramqvist, Johannes Anyuru and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp.