No Goodbye Today
A poignant, sweeping novel about grief and family secrets
‘Someone is already going to die in this chapter,’ the nameless narrator cautions on the very first page of No Goodbye Today. En route to his holiday destination, Oskar van Bohemen collapses at Schiphol Airport, which turns out to be a place of departure in more ways than one. From there, we follow his three grown children, who each had their own difficult relationship with him and experience his death in very different ways.
Oskar – a father most notable for his absence – worked in the Dutch filmworld and in Hollywood, where he spent months at a time and led a second life. He barely talked about his work. How do you mourn someone who was hardly ever there when he was alive? Now that the opportunity for a reconciliation or a confrontation has definitively passed, his children, Tessel, Moor and Cat, are left only with their memories, their father’s possessions and his secrets, which begin to rise to the surface as they clear out his house. As the perspective flips between the three, we get to know each character by how the other two see them. Tessel, the eldest, has been struggling with writer’s block for years after her acclaimed debut novel and is trapped in an unhappy marriage. Her brother Moor, a self-proclaimed bohemian, is still bitterly resentful about the fact that he was the only one in the family who got hit by his father on occasion. And Cat, who is studying Freud at a prestigious university in New York City, wonders who she might have become if she’d been free from her father’s critical scrutiny – or did she misread his gaze? In resonant prose, Heerma van Voss shows the chasm between worrying about everyday banalities and mourning a parent. We see a generation who didn’t get much help from their parents when it came to reaching emotional maturity and had to figure out for themselves how to be resilient in the face of life’s challenges.
As in Jonathan Franzen’s family epics, Heerma van Voss combines sharp analysis with empathetic descriptions of Tessel, Moor and Cat’s struggles. Can you get past something as major as the loss of a parent? And can you ever be at peace knowing certain questions will never be answered?
No Goodbye Today is a keenly perceptive exploration of the lasting impact of childhood traumas and the universal yearning for love and safety.
Publishing details
Geen vaarwel vandaag (2023)
375 pages
107,000 words
6,000 copies sold
Sample translation available
Publisher
Atlas Contact
Hayo Deinum
hdeinum@atlascontact.nl
Rights
Peters Fraser + Dunlop
Lisette Verhagen
lverhagen@pfd.co.uk
Rights sold
Diogenes (Germany)
Translated titles
De laatste oorlog [The Last War]: China (Flower City, 2019), Germany (DTV, 2018), Spain (Malpaso, 2018), Sweden (Weyler, 2017). De bange mens (The Anxiety Project): Germany (Diogenes, 2023), Lithuania (Tyto Alba, 2024), Poland (Slowne, 2022), Russia (Ast, 2023), UK (MacLehose, 2023). Een verlate reis [A Belated Journey]: Germany (Büchergilde Gutenberg, 2020), Sweden (Faethon, 2018)
Sample Translation
“All families are normal when you’re growing up in them; no family is normal when you look back on it’ – that apt quote sums up No Goodbye Today, a family epic as true-to-life as it is devoid of ego, as ordinary as it is extraordinary (…) One of the warmest books I read this year.”
“Daan Heerma van Voss writes with precision and compassion about what shapes us – and how we don’t get to have much of a say in that.”
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