Compensation

Georges is dead. Charlotte’s live-at-home, darling son hit his head while out drinking, and she had to find him, still wearing last night’s clothes, lying on top of his sheets. He was only thirty-four.

Left with only her philanderer, porn-addicted husband Erik for company, Charlotte desperately casts around for a way – any way – through her immeasurable grief.

Erik, a surgeon, will remove their dead son’s sperm, and a surrogate will bring his baby into the world. The couple turn to Lena, their undocumented cleaner who has big dreams of her own. And as the once-established power dynamics begin to shift between the trio, desperation and guilt will push all three to their limits.

Audacious, biting, and darkly funny, Compensation is a novel about power: about those who have it and those who wish they did. A poignant and twisted psychological portrait of a household in crisis, it stirs an intoxicating cocktail of delusion, repression and longing that subverts until the very end, interrogating the meanings of love, family and morality in a brutally cruel world.