The Scandinavian Star was a passenger ferry that, in the small hours of April 7th, 1990, went up in flames, killing 159 people. Generally considered an insurance job, given the dodgy dealings preceding the disaster, the finger of blame is still circling to this day. Though for all the accountability that may yet fall on individuals or government authorities, in Money to Burn (2020, tr: Caroline Waight, 2025), the first in her proposed Scandinavian Star septology, Asta Olivia Nordenhof identifies a more abstract antagonist: capitalism.

Nordenhof’s critique of laissez-faire economics surfaces around a third into the novel, brief but impactful. However, her alignment of the tragedy in human terms with her thematic concerns finds an oblique entry point in the lives of an older Danish couple, Kurt and Maggie, sometime in the late 80s. Kurt is an introvert, uncomfortable in his skin, but he has made modest steps in life, notably the founding of his small bus company in a bid to be his own boss. The novel mostly focuses on Maggie, whose earliest memory is of a wartime bunker, emerging, like the rest of the world, into a post-war economic boom. But the spoils of this growth appear thin on the ground. The struggles they face, financially and socially, play into the broader ideas of how systems can promise opportunity and yet fail to deliver: personal battles reflect the crushing of all the passengers’ lives in the larger mechanisms surrounding money.

Nordenhof’s omniscient narrator (presumably Nordenhof herself) jumps around her characters’ lives, forward and back. In short chapters, she delivers fractured vignettes that capture key moments in their stories. There’s a certain freedom to a young Maggie’s boarding of a train to Rome while penniless, but her initial blagging of hotels turns to brief relationships sees her accrue unbearable episodes. Through her early years, Maggie experiences homelessness, sexual abuse, and – (“A man’s face was a hole from which money could be drawn.”) – other humiliations. Though she survives it all,  years later she hopes her daughter, Sofie, will earn her own money and have no need of a man.

The man Maggie needs is, of course, Kurt. He’s a broken man, emotionally unstable, controlling, and, at this human level, the patriarchy. His own insecurities and disappointments fuel his ill temper, and assert his power. But when Nordenhof scratches at his surface, later in the book, we get to see another person harshly treated by life, another everyman in the grind of capitalist structures that own us, be that via banks, utilities, or marketing. By bringing the thematic concerns of the ferry disaster down to a personal level, Nordenhof is showing us the systems we live in and that everyone is exploitable and collateral, not only to the wealthier powers above them, but to each other. People aren’t affected for an idea: “In order for one group to profit, somebody and something else may have to die. That is the idea.”

Stylistically, Nordenhof’s prose is definitely poetic in its concise captures. Each paragraph stands alone, saying only what needs to be said. When accounting Kurt and Maggie, the narration is detached but still wrings out emotion from our natural empathy. And when pursuing its wider themes it’s positively charged, engagingly propulsive that sometimes it can come as a shock when a line appears that makes you stop and reflect, like “Money is a space that extends far beyond the capacity for pain.”

Its heartfelt anger at capitalism’s capacity to infect lives does warrant the question: what’s the viable alternative and how do we get there? Perhaps such answers will come in one of the further six titles, each listed out at the back of the book, with tantalising names like ‘Maria, Atlantis’, ‘Ideas 2’, and ‘Jørgen Is Scarified. For now, Nordenhof is highlighting struggles within its overarching structure. While Money To Burn is a standalone work, it’s an interesting beginning to what seems an ambitious project, wherever it may be headed.