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Acts of Infidelity is the second novel by Lena Andersson that follows unlucky-in-love heroine Ester Nilsson, and it’s another scalpel-sharp look at a doomed relationship In Wilful Disregard (2013), Andersson showed – in excruciating detail – the drawn-out decline of a love affair where one person is ambivalent and the other is wholly in love; here, we get an equally unflinching look at Ester’s involvement with a married man It is very much a standalone book, although there are echoes of Wilful Disregard throughout; I was overjoyed to be reunited with the funny, intelligent Ester and curious to see whether she had learnt anything from her previous relationship (with Hugo Rask, an artist who spent the entirety of Wilful Disregard blowing hot and cold), only to recognise quickly that she had not It would be tempting and satisfying in a book to steer the characters away from their past mistakes, to make them do things differently this time – but in real life people don’t necessarily learn, not when it comes to matters of the heart   Ester is an intimidatingly clever person, someone who has dedicated her life to understanding and recording the world around her intensely through writing and theorising And yet, when it comes to men, she has a particular blind spot Her intelligence, in a way, is her undoing; it gives her the capacity to self-deceive endlessly, to analyse even the smallest situations and find them, somehow, hopeful Olof fails to send her a text message on the first New Year’s Eve that they’re a couple, an act which Ester interprets a sign of him being emotionally overwhelmed by his feelings for her, unable to condense them in a mere text With her friends – styled as the anonymous ‘girlfriend chorus’ in Wilful Disregard, but here fleshed out more as individuals each with their own approach to The Problem of Olof (and to love more generally) – Ester is able to analyse and re-analyse in a way that’s both absurd and also painfully familiar to anyone who’s ever been there   As the observers of this unromantic romance, we