Shamed schoolteacher, Mathilde, moves to a dairy farm in the Norwegian countryside for an ‘easier life’, but she’s soon up to her old tricks … upending and unsettling the lives of two reclusive farmers.  Exquisitely written, razor-sharp and simmering with an unexpected tension, Toxic marks the return of one of Norway’s finest writers.

When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life.   Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales – many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes.   But beneath the apparently friendly and peaceful pastoral surface of life on the farm, something darker and more sinister starts to vibrate and, with Mathilde’s arrival, cracks start appearing … everywhere.