Money to Burn

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A groundbreaking, profound and intimate novel about capitalism’s effects on the human heart: Money to Burn is the first volume of the Scandinavian Star series, a new masterpiece of Danish literature

Maggie and Kurt are struggling to hold their marriage together after their only daughter has left home. They live in an 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 159 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? How does money affect and infect our closest relationships? And is it ever possible to escape?

‘A comet in Scandinavian literature’ Olga Ravn

‘Startling and irresistible’ Claire-Louise Bennett

'A new masterpiece of Nordic literature' - Dag og Tid

'The most ambitious literary project of the 2020s' - Jyllands-Posten

© Asta Olivia Nordenhof 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

Into the narrow field of Scandinavian multi-decker novels – populated by Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgård – strides a new star... Buzzes with electricity… It’s intriguing, it’s maddening, it’s exciting. I’m in
Observer
Taut and intelligent prose… there's no doubt about Money to Burn: somehow, Nordenhof has managed to write a moving love story and an incendiary indictment of contemporary society
Literary Review
Nordenhof's writing crackles with indignation, conviction, ferocious wit, and savvy human insight. Startling, irresistible, and thoroughly enlivening, reading her words is not unlike looking at the entrancing flames of a tremendous fire
Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Checkout 19
A comet in Scandinavian literature. Her sentences are like lightning, they hold great beauty and destruction. Funny, furious and masterful – Money to Burn is a declaration of war against capitalism
Olga Ravn, author of My Work
Money to Burn is ambitious in its structure and narrative, but Nordenhof carries it off with ease. Unusual, fascinating, and complicated in the best way
Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
What blew me away was how — with its shard-like chapters — Money to Burn renders not only the inner lives of the married couple at the centre of the story with truth and depth, but something of the texture of their individual existence, their ways of being in the world, together and apart. Nordenhof’s writing is electrifying.
Chetna Maroo
Money to Burn is direct and full of fervour. I loved how fast it makes it moves and how much grandeur it achieves. I need the next instalment desperately
Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future
It contains both the scale of a grand epic with the careful and clarified language of a Claire Keegan novel. So rich in its storytelling, sense of place and characterisation that even in its darkest moments it's impossible to look away [...] Entirely intoxicating and compulsive, this is a story in the hands of an utterly remarkable writer, and has me very much desperate to read more. Perfect
Ore Agbaje-Williams
Unbelievably good. I can’t think of anyone apart from Kristen Thorup, who in the last decades has written so compassionately and vividly and at the same time so unsentimental about people on the fringes of the wealthy lives of the welfare state
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Money to Burn signals the start of a new masterpiece of Nordic literature
Dag og Tid

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