In Agnes Lidbeck’s debut novel, first published to great acclaim in Sweden in 2017, motherhood is a game with explicit ‘rules’. Don’t shout, don’t raise your voice, don’t use the wrong words. Imperatives – ‘The mother must…’; ‘The mother must not…’ – intersperse the narrative. The novel’s three sections are structured around the three roles that the ‘social contract’ obliges women to play: they must be mothers, they must be desirable and they must be care­givers. So long Donald Winnicott’s ‘good enough’ mother, who raises a healthy child by virtue of her shortcomings.

Much of the novel’s interest comes from the unflattering portrait of its protagonist, Anna, who tries the reader’s patience with her narcissism and willing subservience to the roles men assign her. The novel is narrated in the third person, but from Anna’s perspective. It opens with Anna nursing her newborn son, Harry. As Anna raises Harry to her breast, she is curiously lacking in feeling, doing so only because it is recommended for stimulating bonding and milk production. She is merely following orders. The child, ‘yellow and hot’, is a screaming creature who invades her marriage and sex life, while Anna’s husband, Jens, is regarded with resentment and jealousy for taking to fatherhood. As Harry grows and another child, Hedda, is born, Anna experiences a mounting sense of frustration: she daydreams about her children dying and thereby becoming ‘free and sorrowful and interesting’. So when she meets newly divorced Ivan, a writer of note and a public intellectual, she sees a chance to adopt a new role – that of mistress. In Nichola Smalley’s translation, a restrained, almost clinical tone prevails. The language is taut, free of excess, mirroring the grey terrain of the rules by which Anna lives.

The course of the affair is predictable, but careful attention is given to Anna’s inner world. More convincingly portrayed than the woes of motherhood are the deceptions of bourgeois married life. Anna and Jens’s existence is one of easy comfort and material excess. The arrival of spring means buying tulips,