The Devil Book (Djævlebogen)

WINNER of the Jutland-Postens Literature Award 2024 

A bold tour-de-force about violence and money, love and desire, and a stand-off with the Devil himself.

A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. While she sits out a two-week Covid quarantine in his apartment, she begins to tell her story. Years ago and desperate for money, she sold herself to a stranger 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.

But at the last moment, she aborted the treacherous game and fled. Now in London, she reflects on the forces - financial and social - that led her to the brink of destruction, and wonders what it would take to believe in love again.

Frank, intimate and dazzling entertaining, The Devil Book is a classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story. Taking us from Copenhagen to London to the inside of a mental institution, as well as a fancy apartment block, this unmissable stand-alone novel is the follow up to the critically-acclaimed Money to Burn.

‘Into the narrow field of Scandinavian multi-decker novels – populated by Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgård – strides a new star. Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s Money to Burn, a bestseller and prize winner in Denmark, is the first novel in a seven-part series, inspired by a fire on a passenger ship off the coast of Norway in April 1990 that killed 159 people. The book buzzes with electricity. (…) The next volume of the Scandinavian Star series, The Devil Book, comes out in September, and will be a standalone novel. Will we see Maggie or Kurt again? Will it all connect in the end? It’s intriguing, it’s maddening, it’s exciting. I’m in’

– The Guardian