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.”
Daan Heerma van Voss
The Anxiety Project
When Dutch novelist and historian Daan Heerma van Voss finds himself in yet another break-up because he is just too anxious to be with, he sets out to unearth the roots of his deepest fears. He is not alone though: 264 million people suffer from anxiety, and this number is growing every day. Digging more deeply, Heerma van Vos wonders whether our genes have something to do with it. What is the link between anxiety and creativity? And how can you love another when you are in a constant state of fear?
B. Carrot
A Way Out
Magda is a young teacher at a primary school in Warsaw. She is caring, kind, responsible and has her life in order. But then she gets pregnant. The pregnancy is unwanted, but abortion is illegal in Poland. The subject is so controversial in Poland’s conservative political climate that it’s hard to talk about, even with her friends and family. The only person she is able to confide in is her sister.
Joost de Vries
Higher Powers
It’s the early decades of the 20th century. James Welmoed is too British for his Dutch school – just like he’ll be too Dutch for London later in life. In 1930s Indonesia, he is an inscrutable member of the colonial establishment. No one knows what to make of him – including Elisabeth van Elsenburg, an eighteen-year-old so witty she could only be the brainchild of an author with a keen intellect and boundless dexterity. She’ll grow up to be a writer, but first she embarks on a love affair with Welmoed which, even though it will be cut short, will shape both their lives.
Daan Heerma van Voss
No Goodbye Today
‘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.
