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The Devil Book

Guardian Best Translated Fiction of 2025

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The Devil Book

Written by: Asta Olivia Nordenhof, Caroline Waight - translator
Narrated by: Neele Bjerre
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Brought to you by Penguin.

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.
'Nordenhof's writing is electrifying' CHETNA MAROO
‘A comet in Scandinavian literature’ OLGA RAVN

© Asta Olivia Nordenhof 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction World Literature
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Critic Reviews

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
So beguiling… the book as a whole is...an undeniable success: funny and angry, tender and timely
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
[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
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
Fizzes and soars (Mark Haddon)
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