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Her debut Spelregels (The Rules of the Game, 2001) was followed by Wolfsroedel (Wolf Pack, 2002), an historical epic about power and its abuse in the Balkans, and the masterly Schijnbewegingen (Tricks of the Trade, 2005), the first part of her recently completed Victorian trilogy ‘A Green Flower’. Zwigtman’s use of language is rich and powerful. She has deservedly won a number of prestigious literary awards and has been welcomed with open arms by readers and critics alike. Zwigtman regards Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights) and Melvin Burgess as literary models, admiring them for their honesty about human relationships. Another favorite is Astrid Lindgren, whom she respects for her imagination and versatility.

Floortje Zwigtman

Tricks of the Trade is Zwigtman’s best novel to date. Adrian Mayfield is born in the poor East End of Victorian London, the son of a pub landlord and a seamstress. However, a different career lies in store for him.It’s not a scenario that the street-hardened lad could have envisaged: a wealthy older gentleman falls in love with him and takes him home. The man is Augustus Trops, a second-rate artist from Flanders. He introduces Adrian to the flamboyant circle of Oscar Wilde, where he meets other men like Augustus and finds work as an artist’s model. The work pays well and he meets the most interesting and powerful people of his time.Adrian is very pleased with his new life at first. Everything appears to be going swimmingly. Until, that is, London’s beau monde decamps to Europe for the summer holidays, as happens every year.Adrian, by now accustomed to luxury, ends up without any income. In a male brothel he discovers the flip side of his new life in the twofaced London of the nineteenth century, where gossip, blackmail and brutal police violence make homosexuality a highly dangerous way of life. Then he faces the choice of whether to put his integrity and his friendships on the line so that he doesn’t have to live in a mouldy, cockroach-infested garret.Tricks of the Trade is an intense book that is difficult to put down. It draws the reader in without resorting to cheap sensationalism. This is a result of Zwigtman’s unique ability to combine critical distance with open intimacy. The raw, breathtaking writing of this sharp, historical portrait really makes the reader think about life. Zwigtman is one of the great modern writers of books for young adults.

A ‘Great Dutch Novel’ for not-yet-adults, which will also entertain older readers with its glimpses into the world of Oscar Wilde.

'Tricks of the Trade' is a masterpiece with international appeal.

'Tricks of the Trade' is a real doorstopper of a book, packed with pure reading pleasure (…). This is a brilliantly depicted world, full of questions and puzzles and menace, money and talent and pleasure, and conversations, loaded with elegance

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Children's books

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Schijnbewegingen

Rarely has a book for young adults been so eagerly anticipated as 'Tricks of the Trade', the third book by the popular young author Floortje Zwigtman. She understands better than anyone else that adolescents aren’t looking for a neat book of instructions for the future. These are stories that tell it like it is, historical novels about surviving in conditions where the laws and morals of polite society no longer seem to apply.

Tricks of the Trade

Allard does not think much of Marjorie’s looks, and he soon begins to loathe her, in spite of Marjories’s attempts to make him happy. The young couple, the “knight? and the “maiden,? avoid each other and go their separate ways. Allard goes off with his macho friends, and in her loneliness Marjorie retreats to the strange castle, where she has only one friend: the steward Gilbert, who can see that Marjorie wants to be more than meek as a sheep, dumb as a cow and pretty as a mare, as one of Allard’s friends describes the ideal maiden. Allard abuses Marjorie, and his family is upset because is not yet pregnant. All this plays out against the overwhelming fear of the Plague, which claimed the life of Allard’s older brother three years earlier, a brother who was dearer to him than Marjorie is now. Alchemists, quack doctors and soothsayers cash in on that fear and feed superstition. Nevertheless in the end Marjorie succeeds, at least in part, in breaking through the strict rules ofsthe Medieval game of man-and-woman, creating a meaningful life for herself and becoming good friends with Allard.The book is written in modern-day language, with our modern-day knowledge of psychology and male-female relationships, and that gives not only an outer sharpness and sparkle, but also an inner depth to our image of “the olden days?. This shows the reader what Medieval knightly life was really like. It lets you see how unhappy both young people are in their conflict with the oppressive “rules? of adult life, which are imposed on them when they aren’t yet ready for them. Rules of the Game is a striking historical novel for young readers, written in a sober, fluid style.

The appealing thing is the way in which children, despite all the rules, try to make the best of their lives. Today’s children will recognise many things, although the rules are different now.

'Spelregels' is a promising debut, written in a language soft as satin and with a quite natural attention to even the smallest things, so that it feels you are there yourself.

With this book Floortje Zwigtman has burst from the starting blocks.

Spelregels

'Rules of the Game' is a historical novel for young readers, set in the Middle Ages, about an arranged marriage between two noble teenagers, which proceeds according to strict, patriarchal rules. After all, in the fourteenth century marriage is not a question of love, but of convenience, and so as a child Marjorie van de Witborg is already destined for Allard van Goudheuvel. We hear from both of them in turn, and they are quite candid about their feelings. When they get married, they hardly know each other.

The Rules of the Game

Who isn’t curious to find out what happens next in her fascinating story about Adrian Mayfield, the homosexual working-class son of an alcoholic pub landlord from the East End who goes in search of love and money in the sensual Victorian demi-monde of Oscar Wilde and his aristocratic, artistically-minded friends, mixing with journalists, dandies and young male prostitutes? Who doesn’t want to hear more about this complex young man, who took the literary world by surprise when he appeared in the highly praised Schijnbewegingen (Tricks of the Trade, 2005) and then again in Tegenspel (Countermoves), which Zwigtman wrote with such great power and verve, further developing the ominous storyline and Victorian setting and the theme of living a lie because of sexual taboo.Countermoves centres upon the homosexual scandal involving Oscar Wilde in 1895, when, following two sensational trials, he was convicted of gross indecency.Zwigtman skilfully combines fact and fiction in the courtroom, where the crowds jostle to watch Wilde’s trial in a palpable atmosphere of ‘disgust and delight’. Adrian, who has clambered up the social ladder through a combination of cunning and deceit, is able to attend the trial as a trainee journalist, but there in the courtroom he is painfully confronted with his own past as a prostitute and with blackmail tactics. London’s hypocritical high society turns its back on him as a result. Even the wealthy artist Vincent Farley, Adrian’s protector and great love, closes his doors to him, but he cannot return to the East End, where poverty, prostitution, drunkenness and death on the streets are the order of the day. Lonely and despondent, he stands on the edge of an abyss as it rapidly crumbles beneath his feet.Will Adrian survive his existential struggle? Or will Zwigtman show no mercy? Her rich and vivid prose and her engaging voice will not only cause you to gaze in admiration at the atmospheric portrait of Victorian London, but also make you want to read on as quickly as possible.

A female Charles Dickens.

A masterpiece with international appeal.

No other Dutch author dares to write as honestly and uncompromisingly for young people as Floortje Zwigtman.

Spiegeljongen

‘The story I want to tell needs time and space,’ Floortje Zwigtman said in an interview to mark the publication of 'Tegenspel' (Countermoves, 2007), the second part in her Dickensian trilogy ‘'Een groene bloem’ (A Green Flower). Fortunately, she allowed herself that time and space: 'Spiegeljongen' (Mirror Boy), the long-awaited 608-page final volume in the series, is now ready to be devoured.

Mirror Boy

The story of father Ion takes place in the nineteenth century when, as a boy of fourteen, he and his friends Alexandru and Vulpe lost interest in the hard life on the farm and slipped away to join the gang run by Vulpe’s brother Lupu and known as the Wolfsroedel, the Wolf Pack. Their initiation into the robbers’ existence is harsh. Gradually ‘harsh’ degenerates into ‘immoral’ and even ‘criminal,’ when firmly implanted scruples are not strong enough to shake off peer-group pressure. The gang desecrates an old grave at Snagov Monastery on an island in the middle of a lake. It’s the grave of the fifteenth-century prince Vlad Tepes, known in Romanian folk tales as Prince Dracula. Stories of this notorious villain and his brother come to life in the Chronicles of Snagov, episodes narrated from days gone by. Little by little Zwigtman reveals the relationships between the fifteenth-century royal brothers and the farm brothers Lupu and Vulpe from the nineteenth, relationships that prove to be not only historical but magical and mythical as well. The meticulous way in which the author shows how an Al-Qaida-like mentality and rhetoric can develop, albeit a Christian variant – or what passed for Christian in the fifteenth century – , is what gives the book its relevance. The book is saturated very naturally with Romanian folk culture. It is one long fireside tale, interspersed with Romanian folk stories, mythology, riddles and vampires. Zwigtman constantly plays with the border between reality and fantasy, and her evocative use of language lends an inescapable realism to these supernatural phenomena. A masterful young people’s novel on the origins of violence, and an appeal, especially to those under peer group pressure, to think and act autonomously.

Magisterial youth literature about how violence erupts.

A tome of majestic proportions, 'Wolfsroedel' is so multifaceted and wide-ranging it will stay with me forever. It is about the essence of mankind and has the oppressiveness of Golding’s 'Lord of the Flies', the mysteriousness of Preussler’s 'Master of the Black Mill' or Eco’s 'The Name of the Rose', and the suppleness of Lindgren’s 'Ronja the Robber’s Daughter'

As far as style and composition are concerned, 'Wolfsroedel' is as solid as a rock. The historical and fictitious narratives are perfectly interwoven into a marvellous epic that bites deep into the reader.

Wolfsroedel

'Wolfsroedel' (Wolf Pack) is an impressive young people’s book: well written by a gifted author, it has a strong narrative that is relevant, originally structured and abounding in ideas. It is a complex, grown-up novel, a frame-work story in which a Romanian son talks about the tales that his father, Ion Brebu, once told him at the fireside. It’s a simple beginning, but Father’s own breathtaking story about the band of robbers to which he and two of his friends belonged in their youth pushes the narrow framework into the background, and the reader is drawn into a world as real as it is surreal.

Wolf Pack

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