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The story of a wild child who becomes a manic dream pixie girl who then becomes trapped in a nasty love/hate relationship with a typically sweet-one-minute, vicious-the-next man, and then turns into a full-time moper. Frank Sinatra sings “Regrets? I’ve had a few/But then again, too few to mention��. This is not Maggie’s philosophy. After her relationship with Kurt goes bad she does nothing but mention her regrets, there are so many. Oh woe, her misspent life! I sound unkind, I know, I know.

In the middle of this love hate psychodrama the gigantic real life tragedy of the Scandinavian Star is dropped into this short novel like a big rock into a small pool. This happened on 7 April 1990, a terrible fire on board a car and passenger ferry which killed 159 people. It was probably an insurance scam gone dreadfully wrong. No one was ever convicted except one person who died in the fire.

So there is a connection between this miserable pair Maggie and Kurt and this disaster. It’s hinted at but that’s all.

Modern authors like to write novels exploring real life crimes �� recently I read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, about the opioid epidemic, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (about the Magdalen Laundries scandal in Ireland). So this is one of those, kind of.

I know this is part one of a series of seven novels which will add up to a great modern epic, but this opening instalment did not leave me eagerly awaiting the next part. Asta Olivia Nordenhof skips about the story of Maggie and Kurt like a speedfreak grasshopper. And she has a tendency to quasimystical abstraction :

Maggie gets the sense it’s all supposed to suggest something, but she doesn’t know what it is. A sense that meanings are doubled, with a message that is closed off to her. She wants to lift the dreams out of the room and into herself

Other readers will like this a whole lot more than I did.