The Devil Book

Guardian Best Translated Fiction of 2025

A classic girl-meets-boy-meets-devil story from a Danish literary superstar

A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen and agrees to visit him in London. Free in a new city, she reveals how she once sold herself to a man called T. Desperate for money, she accepted when T offered her lavish gifts and a suitcase full of cash in exchange for total control of her body. But at the last moment, she chose life and fled.

In London, the woman watches the people around her, searching for clues on how to live in the face of betrayal and loss, and what freedom really looks like. Intimate, revelatory and ultimately revolutionary, this is a portrait of a woman driven to the brink of destruction, who learns to believe in love again.

Translated by Caroline Waight