The Danish writer Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s ongoing series Scandinavian Star is named after a passenger ferry that was set on fire on 7 April 1990, killing 159 people. Seven books are planned; two have so far been published in Denmark. In Money to Burn – the first in the series, now available in English – the crime is mentioned in a journalistic interlude that interrupts what is otherwise a fairly conventional love story, one that Nordenhof, with her taut and intelligent prose, tells with great delicacy. 

The novel opens in solid post­modern style. The narrator is on a bus on the Danish island of Funen when she sees a white-haired old man. From his face alone, she gets ‘the inkling of a farm’. Weeks later, still thinking about him, she retraces her steps and finds the farmhouse from her visions. The old man is Kurt, a former factory worker who runs a bus company from the farm where he lives with his girlfriend Maggie, ‘the last in a very long line’ of women with whom he has been involved. Haunted by what her life might have been, by ‘how little it would have taken for everything to be completely different’, Maggie sees in her daughter Sofie the dreams of her own youth – a university education, a career, freedom – fulfilled. Maggie’s past is a blur of council bedsits, hippy campsites and the homes of random older men. There was ‘no place on the regular job market for someone like her’, the narrator writes of the younger Maggie. Maggie has had sex with so many men she often passes them in the street without recognising them: ‘A man’s face was a hole from which money could be drawn.’

Kurt, it emerges, is boorish, abusive and unfaithful. A heavy drinker, he spits at Maggie if she so much as mentions a sexual encounter from the past. But Nordenhof manages to kindle sympathy for both characters. They are the money-battered casualties of a society to which they can’t conform and