You have no time to lose – your first patient is already sitting in the waiting room with a look that is depressed or anxious. He promised he wouldn’t kill himself over the weekend, and in exchange, you promised him an appointment as soon as the weekend was over.

Emma is a specialist psychologist at the psychiatric hospital in Oslo West, and she is starting to doubt whether her patients are actually making progress, whether the therapy she provides is helping them. Emma's elderly mother is being moved against her will from her house to a care home in the building next to the hospital. They meet on the bench in the garden outside.

The mother thinks about the orphanage where she lived as a child. Emma thinks about Christmas, which is fast approaching, and all that entails. She also thinks about her upbringing, with a mother who was always immaculate, but who was she, really? And what kind of mother is she herself to her two children? Should Emma quit her job because therapy only begets more therapy?

Linda Sandbæk is a little Nina Lykke, a little Helen Fielding, and first and foremost a debut author with a talent for both pain and comedy, preferably in combination. The Therapist’s Christmas examines human nature and psychology in entertaining and astonishing ways.