The Big Clean-Up
A darkly funny quest for the inexplicable by the bestselling, two-time Libris Prize winning author
In 1980, Thomas leaves school without a diploma and takes a job at a small supermarket. One day a walking bottle of a new cleaning product, a mascot called Brixo, tears open in the aisle. There is no one inside: only detergent pours out. His boss acts as if nothing happened, nobody has ever heard of the brand, and soon afterwards Thomas is fired.
Unable to let go, he spends the years that follow searching for an explanation. In Amsterdam he makes a name for himself painting giant cleaning bottles in galleries. Later he ends up in northern England, where he puts on a beer-bottle costume himself, half hoping that something will happen to him too.
With his trademark deadpan humour, Van Essen explores the wonder and weirdness of everyday life. Art, love, science, religion – none of it neutralises the absurd, as one character concludes in the book. A wry, unsettling novel about a man who witnessed something nobody else believes happened.
Two-time winner of the Libris Literature Prize, the most prestigious Dutch literary award
A singular voice in Dutch literature, whose work has been compared to that of José Saramago, Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee
His previous novel, I’ll Come Back to This Later, was the best-selling Dutch-language literary novel of 2024, with more than 50,000 copies sold
Rob van Essen (1963) is the bestselling, multi-award-winning author of more than a dozen novels and short-story collections. Ever since his debut, he has been praised for his imagination and individuality. He won the Libris Literature Prize twice – for The Good Son (2019) and I’ll Come Back to This Later (2024).