Am I Cold

A vicious satire for the credit-crunched generation

Copenhagen, 2008. Excess is in, austerity is out. The crash is about to send everything tumbling down, but everyone’s too wasted to notice. And Mikkel Vallin’s own bubble has already burst. Divorced, sacked from his job as a food critic, the wrong side of forty, Mikkel has had enough: he’s declared war on the monogamous relationship. Jealousy, deceit, hatred ... monogamy, he’s realised, is the root of all our ills. Fortunately, his new girlfriend – a beautiful young

Hungarian artist – agrees. Unfortunately, Mikkel might be falling for her. Among the orgies, the drug-fuelled sprees, the whirlwind of parties, surely there can’t be space for ... love?

Told in Mikkel’s brilliantly spiky, terminally cynical deadpan, Martin Kongstad’s excoriating debut novel turns the last, glorious, debauched days of pre-crash decadence into a wild satire of modern life.

‘This autumn’s funniest and most provocative book about

relationships’

Elle

Mikkel Vallin is a captivating narrator with a seductively

acerbic voice and a very Scandinavian sense of detached cool

Houellebecq meets Bret Easton Ellis; does for late noughties

Copenhagen what American Psycho did for 1980s Wall Street.

Martin Kongstad has worked as a journalist, columnist,

culture writer and food critic at Denmark’s leading newspapers, and has written for film, television

and theatre. His collection of short stories Han danser på sin søns grav won the 2009 Debutant Prize. He grew up in Copenhagen and lives today in Nørrebro. Am I Cold is his first novel