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Göteborg 2027

Manik Sarkar

As a young boy, Rensing grows interested in the question of how to end an animal’s life as skilfully as possible. One day, a bird hits the window of his classroom. Their teacher snaps the bird’s neck to put it out of its misery. The students are shocked – how could he do such a thing? A little later, Rensing says, in what he believes to be a quite normal contribution to the conversation, ‘He should have just smashed its brains in from behind with a little hammer.’ From that moment on he is seen as an outsider. He graduates from his butchery course with top marks and the time has come for his parents to pass on the reins of the family business. He needs a woman by his side to help keep things going, and his parents have someone in mind, Jacomine, whom he ends up asking out on a date. They become involved, though they aren’t in love. Jacomine starts working behind the counter and before long knows the locals better than her fiancé does. Then Rensing finds himself facing two setbacks: his father dies suddenly and the town gets a supermarket. He is the owner of the shop now, but the business is barely breaking even. Rensing believes in the quality of his pricy meat and tries to restructure the business. After taking out a loan he finds himself saddled with a heavy debt, which leads to discord between him and Jacomine. And then a second supermarket opens nearby. ‘For you, there are only two people in this world: you and not-you,’ Jacomine tells him one day, before packing her bags. The times are changing: Rensing begins stocking meat substitutes to cater to flexitarians but he continues to struggle financially, and now he’s on his own. ‘Real loneliness comes from within and there’s nothing, nothing, nothing that can make it any better,’ he reflects. That thought ultimately leads to an act through which he becomes one with his beloved animals.

A brilliant debut about an endearingly ambitious butcher. Sarker’s prose is impressive, and he is a skilled storyteller: building suspense, raising the stakes (cliffhangers!), letting the reader read between the lines and drawing wholly believable characters.

A classic rise-and-fall narrative. Love of animals, bloodlust, craftsmanship, eroticism – in the book’s finest moments, all of these come together.

Book

Debut novel about a butcher’s son devoted to his job and blind to the world around him

Asset

Assets

Marleen Seegers

Ossenkop

In this superbly written debut, we meet a butcher who lives for his craft – he wants to provide the best meat from animals who have had a good life and are slaughtered as humanely as possible. After finishing butchery college, he will be taking over his parents’ business. He has a brilliant future ahead of him.

Oxhead

Adriaan van Dis

When Eefje is diagnosed with a terminal illness, she signs herself into a hospice to receive the care she needs – and have a place to host her admirer. They undertake their last journey together, back in time: to their trips around the world, to their traumatic youths, to their early romances. Told in great detail, for the first time, as death awaits. The conversations reveal why they – two people who had to grieve too soon, who grew up in broken homes and who shrouded themselves in a persistent air of mystery – were always meant for each other.Everything for the trip bundles romance, grief and self-portrait into one. Van Dis’s choppy style and brief, fragmented chapters offer an accurate portrayal of the end of life. He writes about the beauty of a romance kept alive by its limitations – never stagnant, forever a work in progress. At the same time, he shows the systematic erasing of Eefje as a woman and director and how the men she managed rose to fame rather than her.<ul><li>Themes: unconventional love, mourning, literature and poetry, sexual fluidity, the invisibility of female artists</li><li>75.000 copies sold so far</li><li>#1 bestseller upon publication</li><li>An instant topic of conversation in all major Dutch media outlets</li></ul>

A sublime novel, not only about “love and lies” but also about decline and death.

Van Dis creates a monument to a love that existed outside the confines of the ordinary.

That complexity, captured by Van Dis in so few and such simple words, is what makes this novel so good.

A powerful, poetic novel written with a palpable urgency. A declaration of love to a temperamental woman who was unable to choose.

A poetic novel about a secret romance that lasted nearly forty years

Hayo Deinum

For almost forty years, Adriaan van Dis kept the love of his life a secret. Now, following her death, he revives her in this poetic novel about an extraordinary three-way relationship. They meet in the 80s on the set of a TV and literature programme – she, Eefje, is the director; he is the presenter. They fall in love, but Eefje stays with ‘the Other’, with a capital O, as the narrator insists on calling him.

Everything for the Trip

Teddy Tops

In an attempt to give some coherence to her identity, she begins to rewrite the lives of her grandmothers Levi and Jo. What if they had met each other instead of their spouses? What if they had been free to live their lives as they wished?Grandma Levi bears her own unbearable loss: one of a ten-year-old Jewish girl who, one morning, arrived at her school to find the yard deserted. She spent the war living with anyone who would give her a place to hide. After liberation, she regularly returned to the bridge where she had last seen her mother. Maybe, just maybe, she’d find her there.Compelling in its quiet intensity, Tops’s novel consists of two parts – Aboveground and Underground – in which time becomes fluid and the boundaries between memory, figment of imagination and longing blur. The novel’s seven chapters take us through each passing minute of the car accident: as the first-person narrator and her parents sink deeper, we experience moments of extraordinary silence and concentration.<ul><li>A debut that is rare in its literary maturity and highly acclaimed by the Dutch press</li><li>Themes: intergenerational trauma, Jewish experience of WWII, mourning, female identity, the unreliable narrator</li><li>160 pages — dense, poetic and exceptionally ripe for multiple readings</li></ul>

Tops combines a compact writing style with fluid prose, distilling an incredible amount of life into 157 pages.

What if women in post-war Europe had been free to choose their own path? Teddy Tops’s heartfelt novel explores that possibility.

Ernaux, and then some.

A moving and inventive debut novel about the search for missing origins

Martijn Prins

Egelskop

The anonymous first-person narrator in Teddy Tops’s debut novel is the sole survivor of a car crash that kills her parents, leaving her – just four years old – with only a handful of memories that she can’t be sure are true. Each time she replays them in her mind, they appear in a different setting or feature different cast members. How can she know where she really comes from?

Arrowhead

Gabriëlle Terpstra

Geller is born into a dysfunctional family. Mother can’t cope, father is rarely seen at home and disappears after the birth of her younger brother Eliot, who has autism. She is raised by her emotionally stunted aunt. Geller is a failure, or at least that’s what she tells herself: she’s too fat, stupid, ugly. That’s why nobody’s remotely interested in her. Smoking, sex, alcohol and drugs become an attempt to change that narrative.The novel unfolds as a lively two-plot monologue. The first thread begins with Geller&#039;s birth, while the other opens with her as a young woman who realises her dead-end life needs fixing. Terpstra takes an almost nonchalant approach, writing with brutal honesty and a cold, sometimes laconic tone that unsettles as much as it moves. More than anything, this is a portrait of one woman&#039;s courageous search for a better life.<ul><li>A candid book that is as raw as it is full of hope</li><li>A new, young voice in Frisian literature</li><li>Semi-autobiographical: Terpstra draws on her own experiences with addiction and loss</li></ul>

A debut to remember – an instant classic. Reminiscent of Tove Ditlevsen's celebrated Copenhagen Trilogy: a literary adventure through a young woman's life that tests your pain threshold.

Terpstra maintains just the right distance to give an almost unfeeling description of Geller's experiences, allowing the reader to form their own opinion.

A subtle yet profound portrayal of a young woman's life — remarkably lucid, objective and, ultimately, hopeful.

This debut novel by a young Frisian female author is raw, poignant and shamelessly honest – but above all, full of hope

Hille Faber

Geller

Gabriëlle Terpstra is a rising star in Frisian literature. In a humorous, compassionate and crisp style, she tells a story about being born to addicts, childhood poverty, self-medication and sex.

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