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. She becomes his captive, holed up in a swanky apartment for total control of her body and severed from the outside world, in exchange for any material possession she desires. In the bed between them lay a large kitchen knife and the promise of an iconic death.

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.

Translator Caroline Waight pinned down Nordenhof’s ambitious slippery writing experiment in crisp, exacting prose. Sensuality created with lustrous descriptions of roses incestuous perfume or the first-person narrator, Olivia, fixated on her buzzing phone like a “dog” on its “bone”.

The Devil Book is the study of love and money – whether we can’t/ know what love is/until we/ have abolished capitalism. Any yearning Olivia does feel is for a stranger she meets years later at Copenhagen Airport enroute from the benefits office. The interrelation between money, sex, violence and gender, capital’s power to console.

In The Devil Book, Asta Olivia Nordenhof takes us from Copenhagen to London to the inside of a mental institution, as well as a fancy apartment block and is prefaced with a poem in which the Danish author purports to have written three version of T’s life. But recalling her “motto” (“fuck men!”), she changes tack, opting for “an erotic thriller” about a sex worker who makes a Faustian pact with the tycoon.  

The Devil Book By Asta Olivia Nordenhof, translated by Caroline Waight, Jonathan Cape £14.99, 128 pages.The 9^th book