The first novel in Kerstin Ekman’s Katrineholm Quartet opens with the portrait of a faceless woman, a soldier’s wife — “grey as a rat, poor as a louse and lean as a vixen in summer”. She is never known by her proper name (Sara Sabina), not even after her death, and is considered only in terms of the work she can do (dirty, disgusting chores that others avoid), of the children she has brought into the world and of her shackled relation to her man.

Eight years ago I drove through the silent, snow-piled forests of Jämtland in northern Sweden to interview Ekman, one of Sweden’s most highly-regarded novelists, about the 1995 British edition of her darkly compelling masterpiece, Blackwater.

“I shan’t ever forget your midwinter visit up there, and how eager you were to see elk,” Ekman says today as we sit in a London restaurant. She now lives an hour’s drive north of Stockholm in a home that overlooks green fields and is tucked in by woods. “I love my new house, but at times it feels tame,” she says. “I want to go canoeing on wild rivers again. I miss my home in the north.”

Blackwater’s story of a long-unsolved killing and the eventual discovery of its perpetrator recalls the unsolved assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, in l986. The murder brought a sudden end to the country’s sense of innocence and cherished exceptionalism. The Chernobyl nuclear accident the same year also affected Sweden literally and symbolically; the pollution of virgin forest is a dominant theme of Ekman’s book.

Ekman is celebrating the appearance in Sweden of the final volume of a new trilogy, Wolfskin, but has come to London for the publication of the last volume of an earlier, no less ambitious sequence of novels usually known as Women and the City but also as the Katrineholm Quartet after the Swedish town which is both its setting and subject.

The first three volumes — Witches’ Rings (l974, Sweden; l997 Britain), The Spring (l976, 2001) and The Angel House (l979, 2002) — form a unity and, ideally, should be read in succession. The densely worked first novel presents characters that are significant for the whole and also images that constitute leitmotivs. The fourth novel, City of Light (l983), has greater independence, though some of its most powerful passages gain enormously with the knowledge of what has gone before.

“Katrineholm is where I grew up and where my parents grew up, too. My mother was a natural storyteller, and a feminist one. All her stories showed life from the woman’s point of view,” Ekman, 70, says. “She was the first of my sources for the Quartet, though I spent months doing research in archives and looking through private documents.”

The trilogy takes the reader from the l870s to the l940s, from the building of the railway that brought the town into being and led to an era of prosperity. Simultaneously, sometimes surreptitiously, the community of women and children articulate needs that the men tend to overlook.

But all the characters with whom we later concern ourselves descend either from Sabina or from her despised social coeval, Embankment Britta. Though we work our way socially upwards from their thankless, toilsome positions, we retain forceful pictures of the pair.

As the books progress, the reader follows the passage of modern Swedish history — from the tensions caused by Swedish neutrality during Europe’s wars to the country’s transformation into the world’s most comprehensive, egalitarian and affluent welfare state.

By the end of the trilogy Sweden is one of Europe’s wealthiest countries and Katrineholm is a model of mid-20th-century civilisation. The Swedes’ aspirations for their country as Folkhem (people’s home) seems to have been realised. But ignoring the subsistence living out of which the community arose, or the part played by women in this evolution, has its own risks.

City of Light takes the reader forward to the 1970s and deals with a middle-aged woman, Ann-Marie, who returns to her native town from Portugal, where her husband runs a clothing business. She plans to sell her house and heal a rift with her estranged daughter. On her arrival, however, she learns that her daughter has gone missing. She also realises that Sweden’s hopes and social ease have not insulated its people from the problems overtaking the rest of the Western world (drug-taking and the search for existential consolation, for example). Indeed, the very security of Swedish life has produced its own angst and anomie. Ann-Marie succumbs to both as she is forced to survey her past, particularly her relationship with her hopeless, drunkard father.

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