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The book was lauded by reviewers and booksellers alike, and has been translated into German, French, Danish and Hungarian. The French translation was honoured with the Prix Médicis étranger in 2013.

Toine Heijmans

Donald heads off on a solo three-month sailing trip across the Atlantic and the North Sea and hopes to come back as a better husband for his wife Hagar. They have agreed that their seven-year-old daughter Maria will join him for the final stage of his journey, the 200 miles from Tyborøn to Harlingen. Having made it around England and the Kattegat, Donald finds the last 200 miles not that difficult. The weather reports are good, yet things still become tense. Almost home, with the harbour in sight, disaster strikes: he can’t find Maria. Hours of desperation follow, but Donald gets up to strange antics: climbing up the mast, rowing off in his dinghy. While the question remains: has he really lost Maria?Ultimately, this short novel is about fatherhood. Donald constantly makes comparisons with motherhood: ‘Mothers have a head start and fathers can never catch up.’ And: ‘Fathers have to prove themselves.’ But this father is hopelessly failing, on a lonely adventure with his boat and everything going disastrously wrong.The unreliable narrator provides many small clues to indicate that something is wrong with him. His name, for example, is a reference to Donald Crowhurst, whom Heijmans quotes. He was a solo sailor who died in 1969 during a round-the-world yacht race. He attempted to win by reporting false positions, but his boat was found abandoned on the Atlantic, with confused notes and logbooks. Sentences such as, ‘Reality could just be a dream as far as I’m concerned. And the other way round’ certainly set you thinking. In the final pages, when the perspective switches to Hagar, everything becomes clear. But it is not until the very last page – when a badly damaged boat sails into the harbour – that the disillusion is complete.

In this book, Toine Heijmans the novelist has arisen (…) exceptionally beautiful.

In this sailing novel, Heijmans purposefully heads straight towards a chilling dénouement.

Book

Fiction

Op zee

A slate-grey sky full of clouds, the tension of a sailing trip with an uncertain outcome, and every parent’s fear of losing a child: these are the ingredients of this incredibly gripping story. Op zee (At Sea) is a book that does not let go. The story is about Donald, a middle-aged man who has reached a dead end at work. Heijmans presents a perfect sketch of modern office life with its sales figures, mileage allowances, assessment procedures and pointless discussions with clients.

At Sea

Albert Drilling, a special government officer of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, is a diligent technocrat and a man with a mission: to personally ensure that asylum seekers return to their homeland once their legal avenues have been exhausted, ideally with a minimum of embarrassment to the relevant government minister. This mission takes him to an island off the north coast of Holland to track down an asylum seeker who has stayed behind as an illegal alien following the closure of the local detention centre. All he has to go on is her name.Irin Past – she bears a name dreamt up by her father – feels at one with the islanders and they have taken her to their hearts. She has struck up friendships with the ferry captain, the mayor and the island’s most successful entrepreneur. Her exemplary integration into Dutch society leaves Albert undeterred. However, profes­sional pride dictates that he must find a safe and familiar environment for asylum seekers in their country of origin.What form might that take for Irin? She believes her roots lie in Egypt, but this too is the product of her father’s imagination. Albert heads to Cairo to find the house where she was born. There he wades his way through the uprisings of the Arab Spring, detached yet unable to escape entirely unscathed. An ironic thread is that Irin seems to be welcomed by her surroundings, while Albert is forced to grapple with a recalcitrant and hostile reality – from riots on the streets of Cairo to the treacherous wetlands of a Dutch island.Irin’s origins lie in the Kosovar capital Pristina, of which her name is an anagram. For Albert, this is sufficient grounds to insist that she be sent back there. Irin and her friends abandon their attempts at resistance. Or could governmental rules and regulations offer an escape route after all?

'Pristina' is polished to perfection. A rich book.

The great merit of 'Pristina' is that Heijmans has cast a major socio-political issue in the form of a wellwritten novel.

Pristina

In this intricately structured novel, Heijmans delivers a compelling examination of the relative nature of our roots and the loneliness of the asylum seeker, for whom home has become an abstract concept. He contrasts this with the rigidity of a clinical system that mas­querades as humane.

Oxygen Debt is the breath-taking novel about the two friends, Lenny and Walter, who chase their dreams in the alps and Himalayans, and seal their fate in doing so. They carry along the stories of the great alpinists that have done the tours before them, and together they search for a way to write a new chapter of mountaineering history. But in the thin air different rules apply.Ten years after the publication if his renowned bestseller At Sea, Toine Heijmans once again takes the reader along to an unrelenting world, with a novel about freedom and friendship, storms and avalanches, and the consequences of radical choices.<ul><li>Boekhandelsprijs 2022</li></ul>

The ice axe of Heijmans’ sincerity cuts through the clichés and false heroism. On top of that, the scenes in the high mountains are also enormously gripping.

A terrific novel about friendship, loneliness, freedom and mountains.

Zuurstofschuld

The day that Walter Welzenbach climbs his first mountain marks the rest of his life: he never wants to do anything else. Now he is at his final peak, a dizzying 8188 meters high, looking down at his loneliness.

Ogygen Debt

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