Oxygen

A teenage boy and girl shut themselves into a parked ambulance. No-one knows they are there, and what happens between them before their shift as first responder assistants will determine the fate of their families. An hour before, the boy’s grandfather, an extremely wealthy and power-hungry industrialist, celebrated his 70th birthday with an extravagant party. But then everything went wrong, oddly because of his long-time partner.

By means of an unusual plot structure, which tells the tale from the end to the beginning, Oxygen describes 72 dramatic hours in the life of an influential family, culminating in a crash that no one has anticipated. In parallel with a menacing police investigation, romances, lies, old grudges and ongoing heartbreaks rise to the surface through the chapters. And the suspense mounts. The farther we are taken into the past, the more the puzzle takes shape, and gradually the picture becomes clearer. But only in the final chapter do we grasp the entire devastating chain of events, and all the destinies that it has determined.

The narrative of these dramatic events is accompanied by an account of a private and very personal drama. In this case, it is not a police investigation that will decide the outcome, nor the threat of a prison sentence, but the touch of a hand, a brushing of lips, a look, and the tiny flame of a cigarette lighter that will ignite no-one-knows what.