Nothing Really Happened
Impressive debut novel about a woman’s reflection on her tattered life
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.
In 25 short chapters, Joke van Vliet builds her portrait slowly, moving between the present squalor of Daan's flat and the life that led her here. A daughter abandoned by her mother at a young age. A woman of considerable talent who made choices that cannot be undone. A mother herself, whose relationship with her own daughter may carry the same fault lines.
The closer we get to the heart of Daan's guilt, the more her hallucinatory perspective blurs the line between what happened and what she can bear to remember. Van Vliet writes with a precise, cinematic eye, rendering Daan's world entirely through touch, sound, and sensation.
The result is deeply immersive — the reader feels the cold floor, the disorientation, the slow unravelling — and as Daan's past comes into focus, the book tips further into the surreal without ever losing its grip. Questions of motherhood and talent, beauty and sacrifice, run beneath every scene like a current. A taut and deeply unsettling debut.
Gripping and harrowing novel about intergenerational trauma and the expectations of motherhood
Powerfully cinematographic and fragmented writing
Shortlisted for the BNG Literatuurprijs 2025
Joke van Vliet (1970) is an author and visual artist. Her short-story collection Wanneer de herten komen (When the Deer Come, 2022) received widespread critical acclaim.