The God of Chance focuses on the relationship between Ana, a high-flying Danish career woman from the international finance sector whose work is her life, and the young teenager Mariama, two women whose circumstances are completely different. Ana first meets Mariama selling snacks on a beach in Gambia, and the girl gradually becomes a substitute for the family she has never had. The novel moves to Copenhagen and then to London as Ana brings Mariama to Europe to be educated; the girl finds the cultural shock and living with Ana intensely difficult, whilst Ana's obsession with her leads to her own carefully controlled life descending into chaos. The story depicts the gulf between European affluence and Third World poverty; it explores our dependence on money, our need to be in control in every situation, and the problematic relationship between sponsor or donor and recipient. The scene moves from colourful depictions of life in a luxury hotel in Africa, cheek by jowl with desperate poverty, to elite designer flats in Copenhagen, and finally the bustling multicultural community on the streets of London. This novel from 2011 is the latest by the prize-winning Danish author Kirsten Thorup. Her most well-known works are her series of four novels about little Jonna from the provinces, which are also about growing up into the rapidly-changing Danish society of the late twentieth century; and Bonsai (2000), an unflinching account of the scourge of Aids and its devastating effect on an ordinary family.

Kirsten Thorup's Baby introduces us to strangers, the outsiders: misfits, deviants, losers, the powerless, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They are the other side of the coin, the failures. The novel opens in the Mexicana, a cheap nightclub in the Vesterbro district of Copenhagen, where several acquaintances are gathered together in a meaningless, hand-to-mouth companionship. When the club closes, they go their own ways, never to return to the club again a dispersion that gives the book its basic pattern of wandering and aimlessness and no neatly rounded closing of the circle. Their tracts zigzag through the city. We follow Mark, the untalented auto salesman with the Orson Welles profile who is heavily in debt and does not know how to get out, home to his money-grubbing wife who get household income by selling herself to the loan shark who has Mark in his clutches. We follow Suzie on a drunken spree in Sweden with a couple of delinquents. We visit Leni, who has never written the book she wants to write because she has had to support herself by translating porno magazines. We go with her to the home of her former husband, Eddy, who once owned the run-down apartment where Karla, a single mother with two children, now lives. Eddy is the central to the story. He is the spider; his money, and its power, are the poison. Permeating the everyday lives of these characters is an experience that perhaps a woman best can formulate: the experience of being a thing, an object rather than a subject, a receiver, of bribery, of blows and bruises, of caresses, or persuasive words. And perhaps a woman's sensitivity is also particularly suited to describing this state with the unsentimental tenderness that Kirsten Thorup manifests in Baby. Baby deals with people who have been pushed out into the darkness. They are the children of darkness and some of them do dark deeds. But Thorup has said that if she had to choose an epigraph for the novel, it would be a line from Hugo: ""Not those who do dark deeds, but those who create the darkness are the truly guilty ones.