The Devil Book
Published on 4. September 2025
Book
Hardback
128 pages
978-1-78733-518-9 (ISBN)
Description
'Nordenhof has a sort of literary X factor' OBSERVER
'A comet in Scandinavian literature' OLGA RAVN
'Fizzes and soars' MARK HADDON
*Guardian best translated fiction of 2025*
A classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story from a Danish literary superstar
A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. She has lived many lives and as she sits out a two-week quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story.
Years ago, desperate for money, she sold herself to a man called T. He offered her a suitcase full of money and lavish gifts in exchange for total control of her body. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death.
At the last moment, she chose life and fled. Now in London, the woman watches the people around her, searching for clues on how to live in the face of betrayal and loss, and what freedom really looks like.
Intimate, revelatory and ultimately revolutionary, this is a portrait of a woman driven to the brink of destruction, who learns to believe in love again.
'Like a normal novel with the boring bits taken out' Guardian
'Defiantly unique' Financial Times
'A comet in Scandinavian literature' OLGA RAVN
'Fizzes and soars' MARK HADDON
*Guardian best translated fiction of 2025*
A classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story from a Danish literary superstar
A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. She has lived many lives and as she sits out a two-week quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story.
Years ago, desperate for money, she sold herself to a man called T. He offered her a suitcase full of money and lavish gifts in exchange for total control of her body. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death.
At the last moment, she chose life and fled. Now in London, the woman watches the people around her, searching for clues on how to live in the face of betrayal and loss, and what freedom really looks like.
Intimate, revelatory and ultimately revolutionary, this is a portrait of a woman driven to the brink of destruction, who learns to believe in love again.
'Like a normal novel with the boring bits taken out' Guardian
'Defiantly unique' Financial Times
Reviews / Votes
Covering much of the same ground as her last novel - the interrelation between money, sex, violence and gender, capital's power to console or benumb - The Devil Book shares the same bristling, didactic prose, but with a welcome barbed humour... a lacerating literary harnessing of rage at a decrepit system, held together by Nordenhof's defiantly unique voice * Financial Times * So beguiling... the book as a whole is...an undeniable success: funny and angry, tender and timely * Skinny * Nordenhof has a sort of literary X factor, cutting her story down to only the most interesting parts. As Scandinavian septologies go, it's more fun than Jon Fosse's, more ballsy than Solvej Balle's. The final section...fumes with fury * Observer * [Readers] will fall in love with Nordenhof's project purely as text, as properly experimental writing whose moral and artistic purpose are so deeply entwined as to make them inextricable... There is another fire here: a passionate, magnetic commitment to writing as a political act. I will continue to follow this series, wherever it goes * Guardian * Nordenhof's [book] is hot and eccentric... Like a normal novel with all the boring bits taken out, these books are more energising and thrilling the more furious they get * Guardian, *Books of the Year* * Fizzes and soars -- Mark Haddon So tender and pure that it is very difficult not to be moved * Kritik * Even better than the first * Politiken *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Dimensions
Height: 202 mm
Width: 134 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
216 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78733-518-9 (9781787335189)
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Schweitzer Classification
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Persons
Asta Olivia Nordenhof is an award-winning poet and author. Money to Burn, the first book in the Scandinavian Star septology, was first published in Denmark in 2020. It was awarded the PO Enquist Prize and the European Union Prize for Literature and was shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. An international sensation and translated into eighteen languages, Money to Burn was published in English by Jonathan Cape. The Devil Book is the second in the series and was an instant bestseller upon first publication in Denmark. Caroline Waight is an award-winning literary translator working from Danish, German and Norwegian. Her translations include books by Caroline Albertine Minor, Ingvild Rishoi, Maren Uthaug and Dorthe Nors. She was a finalist for the 2023 PEN Translation Award and received a special commendation at the 2023 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.