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Göteborg 2027

Due to a Tender Skin

Animal Stories

More Anton Koolhaas

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Anton Koolhaas

Twelve-year-old Jokke sees Takkie, a girl his age, sitting in her window every day. He dreams of her – when she’s standing in front of him one day, he is dumb-founded. What follows is an outing in a canoe that fills to the brim with shyness and misunderstandings and yet doesn’t tip over. Koolhaas’ prose is always lyrical, but never pretentious. He puts the two young people under an early spring sun – without heat, but full of promise.With the same loving detail, Koolhaas portrays the life of two hudnas – fictitious, beaver-like animals that live off the fish they ingeniously catch in a river delta further downstream. The two animals, Lussel and Twenna are their names, are very instinctive in everything they do, and all too human in their longing for warm Africa, where they were born. Koolhaas’ universe is characterised by gentle irony, great feeling and a sense of powerles-ness. There is no malice here, just regret and ineptitude. In the end, the storylines of the children and the animals converge, when Jokke ends up in the animals’ territory – with fatal consequences. Here, Koolhaas writes one of the most poignant lines in Dutch literature: ‘Very dead, if only just so.’ In Due to a Tender Skin, Koolhaas shows how a writer can use a seemingly small story to explore the major themes of human existence with remarkable subtlety.Publishing details Vanwege een tere huid (1973) 176 pages 33,000 words 200,000 copies soldPublisher Van Oorschot Mark Pieters <a href="mailto:Mark@vanoorschot.nl">Mark@vanoorschot.nl</a>Rights Stella Rieck <a href="mailto:Rieck@cossee.com">Rieck@cossee.com</a>Translated titles (selection) Dierenverhalen (Der dünne Pelz des Bären Burlót. Tiergeschichten): Germany (Luchterhand, 1996). De geluiden van de eerste dag (Die Stimmen des ersten Tages): Germany (Luchterhand, 1999).

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A writer with a bizarre imagination, highly versatile, with an irreverentirony and impressive restraint. Due to a Tender Skin is undoubtedly Koolhaas’ most accomplished book.

I discovered Koolhaas last year. I read Due to a Tender Skin, which turned out to be a forgotten masterpiece, a ten-out-of-ten.

Perhaps I’m basing this too much on the immediacy of the emotions in this book, but I believe this is Koolhaas’ best work yet. His most affecting work, too. And most terrible – because, as he writes in this book, one’s first love is a gift from the devil.

Adriaan van Dis

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.

Book

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

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

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.

Joke van Vliet

At its core, the book is driven by the struggles of a woman with two irreconcilable forces: those of mother and artist.

An impressive work of literature by an author who should be more widely read.

A staggering story.

Impressive debut novel about a woman’s reflection on her tattered life

Niets is echt gebeurd

Daan is blind. She has barricaded herself in her flat, crawling through the filth and the dark, waiting for the police to come. She has done something terrible — something she cannot undo — and she knows it is only a matter of time. We know this from the very first page. What we don't know is how she got here.

Nothing Really Happened

More Fiction

A literary classic about love and the way we rebel against our own vulnerability

Vanwege een tere huid

Few things are more affecting than a lonely twelve-year-old catching a girl’s eye and falling in love at first sight. Anton Koolhaas situates this story full of clumsiness and yearning for the future in a setting shaped by the past. The result is a confrontation the reader will never forget.

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