Title:: [[Money to Burn]] Authors:: [[Asta Olivia Nordenhof]] Tags:: #fiction #translatedfiction Read:: [[2025-02-24]] Instagram :: ## Editions - Edition:: [[Jonathan Cape London]], 2025, First UK English Edition - Original Copyright:: 2020 - Pages:: 154 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: ## Annotations “Fuck everything, we’re going eight volumes.”  - contemporary Nordic authors who have yet to write a multi-volume novel, probably I liked Nordenhof’s Money To Burn a lot. It’s the first English translation volume of her Scandinavian Star septology (second volume coming in August). The series’ name refers to the Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry that was set on fire in April 1990 killing 159 people. The incident and the subsequent controversy surrounding the initial investigatory findings and later allegations of insurance fraud are presumably a theme of the series. Money To Burn is a quick, jolting read. It bounces between periods of time and perspectives in staccato-like chapters. The focus of the first volume surrounds a man and a woman in a marriage marred by abuse, distrust, and the personal histories each brings to it. A brief interlude in the middle, about the Scandinavian Star fire, is fascinating and fierce in its critique of capitalism (“Capitalism is a massacre”). How exactly the couple or the relationship is related to the fire remains to be seen. Nordenhof is a novelist and a poet, and it shows. Loved this imagery: “She sat very stiffly on the sofa, darting him the occassional sidelong glance, the way a heron does, without moving another muscle of her body. He wanted to say something, bind them together in the space, but before he could think of so much as a word Maggie had soaked it up into herself and into her silence.”  Cheers to Caroline Waight’s translation. And thank you [@stephen_r__reads](https://www.instagram.com/stephen_r__reads/) for accidentally ordering two copies so I could get my hands on this one.