Ester Nilsson is 31 years old. She is a poet and an essayist and a sensible person in a sensible relationship. One day in June she receives a phone call and she is requested to give a lecture on the artist Hugo Rask. In the audience sits the artist himself, spellbound, and they meet for the first time after the lecture.

From now on her remaining existence is tightly linked to this conversation, to its intention completely innocent. Hardly anything that occurs after it would have had the same impact without the chain of events that now begins.

A kind of love story unfolds between Ester Nilsson and Hugo Rask, banal in its simplicity and grand in its total devotion.

Arbitrary conduct is a story about how willingly we betray our selves in our longing to be loved.

AWARDS:
Svenska Dagbladets litteraturpris 2013
 The August Prize 2013

REVIEWS:

Speaking of intelligence. I’ll be damned if it isn’t Lena Andersson's middle name. She is known as the public's sharpest analysts in politics and cultural phenomena, but her new novel Arbitrary Conduct is about love - a subject so conventional that in this context it appears to be ingenious .. . Her novel is a creepy lucid dissection of the tangled psychology of love. 

M MAGAZINE

Lena Andersson has written a brilliant, razor sharp novel about love. She is merciless in her vision, shows us how we lie to ourselves in our desire to be loved and dissects Hope, that is supposed to be the last thing to leave man.

AFTONBLADET

Her style is timeless, precise and easy – it crosses Söderbergs love aching sadness with Gun-Britt Sundströms clear irony – and it is this exact concentration that makes the book one of the heavier during the fall. I read it in one go, so fond of it that only one can be when a novel hits the right spot. ... It is cruel but also cruelly fun, a crystal clear statement of hope and its desire and the soul's incurable loneliness, this has Lena Andersson found a perfect form for ... Arbitrary Conduct will surely and rightly result in Lena Andersson's real breakthrough also as a novelist.

SVENSKA DAGBLADET 

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