Until Things Start to Slide
Long-awaited debut novel of one of the Netherlands’ most acclaimed poets
Ela is a prison guard. In her spare time, she is working on what she calls her 'escape book' — a documentary project about people who managed to evade their fate, drawing on confidential files and sources that others can't access. Then she falls pregnant with her third child, her first daughter, and something shifts.
Carrying a girl transports her back: to her father, who died too soon; to her mother, who retreated into books; to all the ways confinement takes hold long before anyone locks a door. Ester Naomi Perquin follows Ela across time and through many roles — daughter, sister, guard, writer, mother.
Each version of Ela illuminates a different kind of trap: the expectations placed on a woman's body, the weight of a father's early death, the particular loneliness of a mother who is always watching others rather than being seen herself. Perquin moves between these moments with effortless fluidity, shifting tone from tragicomic to quietly devastating without ever losing her footing.
What holds it all together is Perquin's instinct for the image that cuts deepest. Until Things Start to Slide is beautiful and highly personal: a debut that only this writer could have written, and one that announces the arrival of a major new voice in Dutch literary fiction.
A personal novel about family secrets, motherhood and captivity in all of its guises
A novel that flickers with wit, raw pain and complexity
Ester Naomi Perquin (Utrecht, 1980) is one of the Netherlands' most celebrated poets. She served as Poet Laureate of the Netherlands and has published several award-winning collections, translated into German (Elif Verlag) and English (White Pine Press). She also writes columns and essays. Before becoming a writer, she spent several years working as a prison guard — an experience that left its mark on her view of confinement, freedom, and the lives lived in between. Until Things Start to Slide is her debut novel.