Money to Burn (Penge pa Lommen)
WINNER of the European Prize for Literature 2020
WINNER of the PO Enquist Prize 2020
SHORTLISTED for the Nordic Council Literature Prize 2021
Maggie and Kurt are a couple struggling to hold their marriage together after their only daughter has left home. They live in a old farmhouse in Nyborg but somehow keep missing each other, unable to discuss the events that brought them together.
Decades ago, a passenger ferry called the Scandinavian Star caught fire, killing hundreds of people. The event is still considered a national tragedy in Denmark and Norway. Years later, it was revealed not to be an accident, but the result of an insurance scam gone wrong.
How is the Scandinavian Star disaster connected to Maggie and Kurt's relationship? How does money affect and infect our closest relationships? And is it ever possible to escape? Money to Burn is both a dazzling work of fiction and a true-crime investigation into the unshakeable hold of money, greed and desire on us all.
‘How do you write a social-realistic, political novel about capitalism in the 21st century? That’s how you do it!’
– Politiken
‘Unbelievably good. I can’t think of anyone apart from Kirsten Thorup, who in the last decades has written so compassionately and vividly and at the same time so unsentimentally about people on the fringes of the wealthy lives of the welfare state’
- Information
‘The indignation and sorrow, the critique of capitalism and the class perspective are certainly not unknown in contemporary literature. Nevertheless, Nordenhof’s first novel isn’t like many others. That’s one of the reasons why Money to Burn sets the bar so unbelievably high for the coming volumes of what can already be dubbed the most ambitious literary projects for the 2020s’
– Jyllands-Posten
'The fragmentary style – interrupted by journalistic information about the disaster –becomes hypnotic. Only at the very end does it become clear what link exists between Kurt and the shipwreck. At that point, as a reader, you immediately want to move on to part 2, as if you're watching a Netflix series. Instead of a comprehensive, traditional historical novel, we're served history in fragments and from different perspectives. Clever. It aligns with the zeitgeist and can attract a new generation of readers to literature.'
- De Volkskrant (Netherlands)
'Jumping back and forth in time, Asta Olivia Nordenhof sketches the tragic lives of these two battered souls, full of poverty and violence, trapped in a relationship where love and hate form an inextricable tangle. Nordenhof's images are so powerful and her sentences so beautiful that this story, however incomprehensible at times, doesn't let you go.'
– VPRO Gids (Netherlands)
