The Devil Book (The Guardian Best Books of 2025)

A classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story, from the unmissable Danish literary superstar
'Nordenhof has a sort of literary X factor' OBSERVER

‘A comet in Scandinavian literature’ OLGA RAVN

A classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story from a Danish literary superstar

*Guardian best translated fiction of 2025*

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

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 Rishøi, 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.