Heart's Delight

Heart’s Delight opens with a 16-year-old boy poised over a desk. He is alone in the room, going through the left over items of a relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Ann-Kathrin. As he systematically destroys each object, he replays a scene from their relationship that relates to it. By the end of this moving story, he has gotten rid of everything; he’s torn up the bus pass from the station where they met, blown the unused condoms into balloons and set them adrift from his balcony, and dropped the pot of lemon balm tea she gave him from the balcony, too. Along the way, Per Nilsson carefully traces their tumultuous relationship, from their first hopeful meeting, to the boy’s loneliness when his family was away and she never called, to her betrayal of him with a rival. Nilsson’s skill in revealing the innermost thoughts of a teenage boy at a vulnerable time in his life made this an award-winning book in Europe.