Annejet van Zijl (b. 1962) is one of the best known and most read literary non-fiction writers of the Netherlands. She is the author of the widely praised biography of popular Dutch children’s writer Annie M.G. Schmidt Anna (2002) which has sold over 100,000 copies. 2004 saw the publication of Sonny Boy, which also became a bestseller, selling over 500,000 copies. Both novels have been adapted into movies
(Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2004, 235 pages)
‘Sonny Boy’, the title of an Al Jolson song from 1928, was the nickname given to Waldemar Nods and Rika van der Lans’ little boy. 1928 was the year their impossible love began, a love they kept alive against all the odds. The contrast could not have been greater: Waldemar was a seriousminded black student from Paramaribo in Surinam, not yet twenty, son of a gold prospector and grandson of a woman who had yet to free herself from the chains of slavery; Rika was the daughter of a Catholic potato wholesaler, warm-hearted and obstinate, a married mother of four, approaching forty when they met. She was his landlady. When he moved in she had only just left her husband and was penniless…
(Querido, 2015, 278 pages)
Annejet van der Zijl, Dutch ‘queen of narrative non-fiction’, now gives us the story of Allene Tew (1872-1955), the female Great Gatsby. An ambitious girl from the country, she had five husbands. Each marriage took her higher and higher into the wealthiest and aristocratic circles, and had her living ever more grandly, in a Park Avenue apartment in New York, for instance, to a château near Paris. It was her fourth marriage to a German aristocrat that gave her the nickname ‘the American princess’.
