The Serious Game

The Serious Game is Sweden's most celebrated and enduring love story.

Arvid, an ambitious and well-educated young man, meets Lydia, the daughter of a landscape painter, during an idyllic summer vacation and falls in love. Lydia, however, has other suitors, and Arvid is frightened of being tied down by his emotions. This is a story of a man and a woman who fall in love when young, and remain in love, but stay separated and marry others.

The message of the book is simple: you can’t play with life. It’s a serious and dangerous game. That’s what Hjalmar Söderberg shows us in this remarkable novel, written with quiet precision and emotional depth. It’s elegant, sharp, and deeply human. The kind of story only an author facing his own inner struggles could create.

A decision that seems small at first, even reasonable given the circumstances surrounding Arvid Stjärnblom and Lydia Stille, ends up setting off a chain of tragic events. You can’t interfere with another person’s fate without consequences. Every choice takes on a life of its own, moving in directions no one expects, until everyone involved finds themselves caught in its pull.

Once the first move is made, everything follows with a kind of dark inevitability. Inertia, pride, resentment, and fear drive people to act in ways they never imagined. Small gestures turn into irreversible decisions. The novel reminds us that the idea of a single, unified self is an illusion. We are made up of many selves, and some of them only reveal themselves in moments of crisis — when everything shifts, when love curdles into bitterness, and when familiar lives become unrecognisable.

Translated from the Swedish Den allvarsamma leken by Eva Claeson. The novel inspired three acclaimed films: Den allvarsamma leken, Games of Love and Loneliness, and A Serious Game.

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Udgivelsesdato

Lydbog: 26. november 2025