Hjalmar Söderberg - Den allvarsamma leken

"I want you to love me in a pagan way!" says Lydia Stille to Arvid Stjärnblom. Once she was the innocent girl he had kissed behind the lilac hedges. Now she is married, as he is himself, but when chance brings them together ten years later, their feelings for each other flare up. And now she is a mature, independent woman who dares to embrace the demands of passion, with consequences he only dimly senses at first.

The Serious Game is a novel about love, illusion and resignation, while echoing the world events of the idyllic early 1900s Stockholm.