Arvid, an ambitious and well-educated young man, meets Lydia, the daughter of a landscape painter, during an idyllic summer vacation and falls in love.

Bo Bergman in Dagens Nyheter wrote: "It is an exquisite pleasure to read this clean and unadorned prose ... On the whole the best that is now written in Sweden", while critic Fredrik Böök in Svenska Dagbladet was very negative.

[3] The book was reviewed in Publishers Weekly in 2002: "Söderberg manifests a keen painterly eye for settings: Arvid and Lydia's affair plays out against a backdrop of serene Stockholm parks, crowded newspaper offices full of workaholic journalists and the spare bedrooms where their trysts take place—and in each locale, the details offered are just enough to create a world of sensations.

Söderberg creates psychological suspense worthy of Dostoyevski, as Arvid's internal moral conflicts achieve the gravity of physical pain.

The 2016 version was directed by Pernilla August and starred Karin Franz Körlof and Sverrir Gudnason In an HBO produced supernatural drama series True Blood (inspired by the books The Southern Vampire Mysteries aka The Sookie Stackhouse Novels), at the end of episode 10 (titled Radioactive) of the 6th season, one of the main characters — a thousand years old vampire — Eric Northman (played by a Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård) is reading Den allvarsamma leken (in its original language), while sunbathing naked on top of a snowy mountain when a brief ability to "walk under sun" for the vampires suddenly vanishes.