Engagement

Gun-Britt Sundström, Kathy Saranpa

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Swedish

Penguin
07 October 2025

Fiction & Literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Fiction in translation

Series: Penguin Modern Classics

A feminist cult classic about love, independence and what it means to be an individual, translated into English for the first time

'I want to have him, I really do. I just don't want him to have me.'

Martina and Gustav, students in 1970s Stockholm, meet and fall immediately into coupledom. But what is coupledom? A route to marriage? A declaration of co-dependency? A new dimension of commitment and responsibility? A sexual confrontation? Or is it a habit that an intelligent person must consider breaking? Martina and Gustav discuss their relationship endlessly, between themselves and with others, as they try to make it work.

Engagement, set during a time of social change and political upheaval, sees Martina trying to engage with the world on her own terms. Unwilling to marry, she finds herself in a state of permanent engagement while her friends settle down to marriage and children; uncertain of the world's future, she engages with demos, sit-ins and philosophy seminars in her quest for a new blueprint for joy. First published in 1976, when it was heralded as an instant classic, Engagement remains as relevant, hilarious and heartbreaking today.

By: Gun-Britt Sundström
Translated by: Kathy Saranpa
Imprint: Penguin
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 137mm, Spine: 29mm
Weight: 474g
ISBN: 9780241688120
ISBN 10: 0241688124
Series: Penguin Modern Classics
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 07 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Gun-Britt Sundstr m (Author) Gun-Britt Sundstr m (b.1945) works as an author, critic and translator. She is the author of sixteen books, including Engagement (1976). Since the 1990s, Gun-Britt Sundstr m has established herself as one of Sweden's foremost translators of children's books and fiction. She received the Helga Prize in 2019 for her 'linguistic sensitivity, self-distance, black humour and acuity'. Kathy Saranpa (Translator) Kathy Saranpa (b.1955) translates from Swedish and Finnish into English. Her first book-length translation was Ingrid and Joachim Wall's A Silenced Voice (2020). Engagement fulfils a lifelong dream of rendering Maken into English.

Reviews for Engagement

Effortlessly contemporary, even refreshing... Aside from writerly skill and timely resonance, part of why Engagement feels so immediate is that its strident politics are married to an eternal, universal central conceit: people not being able to love another as they want to be loved * Financial Times * A novel from which you never really recover. -- Victor Malm * Expressen *