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Göteborg 2027

This page of New Dutch Fiction presents a selection of books recently published in the Netherlands, books that have been included for their artistic and commercial success. Our aim is to showcase the best fiction from the Netherlands. Most titles will have been published recently and will have done very well in terms of reviews, sales and awards or nominations. We highly recommend the titles on this page, and would be happy to give further advice on noteworthy and interesting books for your publishing list. For more information please contact our fiction specialists.

Alara Adilow

Book

Few writers are able to show with such biting clarity how class plays into a person’s transition

Asset

Assets

Marijke Nagtegaal

Kijk es naar al dat licht

“I did the right thing. I’ve become successful. I wanted to win for you, mum,” whispers Sagal as she mops up the last drips of sick with her dress. Her mother is an addict, her house a dealer hangout, her bedroom a cannabis farm. Sagal dreams of taking revenge on the white world that shut her out.  She decides to become rich – incredibly rich. At just thirty, she owns a marketing company turning millions in profit.

Look at All the Light

Anne Eekhout

One day, Lucy&#039;s mother reveals the truth: Lucy is the child of an unknown rapist. From that moment on, Lucy clings to her childhood — but the world she is trying to escape refuses to let her go. What if the darkness she fears is already within her? She appears to have a gift: she can penetrate people’s mind and soul; she can read their thoughts. Her gift is also an unnerving curse, empowering her to wreak untold damage if she chose to. Indeed, she catches herself wishing harm on those who have hurt her. Lucy finds it harder and harder to believe that she is a good person. Is that because she isn’t? Or has she been brainwashed? And are there witches living in the building she calls home? Eekhout once again explores the literary liminal realm between magic realism, thriller and reality, trapping readers in the vice-grip perspective of the unreliable narrator. The Enchantment of Lucy Applewhite is an engaging, complex and exceptionally fast-paced novel. <ul><li> Following her international bestseller Mary, Anne Eekhout revisits the relationship between fantasy and monstrosity</li><li> In the tradition of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and the work of Mary Shelley</li><li>A gothic novel and coming-of-age story about intergenerational trauma and feminism</li><li>Rights sold: BtB (Germany)</li></ul>

This terribly readable thriller by bestselling author Anne Eekhout crackles away, ready to turn into a blaze at any moment. The Enchantment of Lucy Applewhite leaves a trail of blood each time you turn a page. A real gem of a read.

Eekhout has an evocative, almost cinematic writing style.

Quotes about Mary

A fantastically moody, unsettling novel, with a teasing, enigmatic atmosphere entirely its own.

A bold new framing for questions about where we draw lines: between queerness and heterosexuality, the natural and the unnatural, and the imaginary and the real... The narrative unfolds in hypnotic language steeped in fantasy and allusion.

A thrilling and moody gothic novel about a girl who is afraid evil resides within her

Kind van de aarde

New York, 1966. Thirteen-year-old Lucy Applewhite attends a Catholic girls' school; she and her friends have tickets to a Beatles concert. But when her mother makes a horrifying confession, Lucy’s young life is thrown into disarray. This novel is poised between realism and supernaturalism. It is the coming-of-age story of the year: an overpowering tussle between good and evil, dark and light, witchcraft and dark forces.

The Enchantment of Lucy Applewhite

Anne Mieke Backer

I Was the Girl is an answer to a novel that is never named — yet readers familiar with James Salter&#039;s A Sport and a Pastime will recognize it immediately. Near the end of his life, Salter more or less admitted that the young French woman in his book had truly existed. Anne Mieke Backer gives her a voice.It is the 1960s. Anne grows up with her mother beside a canal in a quiet village in the Morvan. She uses her body as a key to unlock a different life, not yet fully aware of the risks that come with being young and female in a world shaped by men.‘He entered my life like someone walking into an unfamiliar room, feeling for the light switch in the dark. He found it quickly. And once I&#039;d brought him to the other side, I stood there in a warm glow — as if I myself were the light.&#039;Just as Percival Everett reimagined Huckleberry Finn in James, Backer reclaims a canonical text from the inside out — elegant, sharp, and entirely her own.

A captivating debut about unequal love — not a settling of scores but a layered, stylistically brilliant story. A beautiful love affair, a feminist takeover, or both at once: Salter seen through the eyes of Annie Ernaux.

Reading Backer after Salter is an enriching experience. Her book stands on its own, claiming a rightful place in the counter-narrative canon.

It takes real guts to frame your literary debut as a response to a world-famous novel. Backer does it with verve, portraying her protagonist in the charged space between innocence and naivety, manipulation and desire.

An ingenious and beautifully written literary response to an American classic

Susanne Rudloff

Ik was dat meisje

She was seventeen, living in rural France. He was an American writer with a family back home. Decades later, she picks up the erotic novel he wrote about their affair — and understands, with sudden clarity, that what he called sport and a pastime was, for her, the start of everything.

I Was the Girl

Ester Naomi Perquin

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&#039;s body, the weight of a father&#039;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&#039;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.<ul><li> A personal novel about family secrets, motherhood and captivity in all of its guises</li><li> A novel that flickers with wit, raw pain and complexity</li></ul>

Ester Naomi Perquin’s writing is so subtle and confident, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is the one of many novels she has written. Bursting with tragicomic descriptions of the prison system, childhood memories and comforting reflections on motherhood.

A level-headed, steady buildup to a sensational revelation.

Long-awaited debut novel of one of the Netherlands’ most acclaimed poets

Stella Rieck

Tot alles in beweging komt

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.

Until Things Start to Slide

Spring Selection 2026

Gabriëlle Terpstra

Geller is born into a dysfunctional family. Mother can’t cope, father is rarely seen at home and disappears after the birth of her younger brother Eliot, who has autism. She is raised by her emotionally stunted aunt. Geller is a failure, or at least that’s what she tells herself: she’s too fat, stupid, ugly. That’s why nobody’s remotely interested in her. Smoking, sex, alcohol and drugs become an attempt to change that narrative.The novel unfolds as a lively two-plot monologue. The first thread begins with Geller&#039;s birth, while the other opens with her as a young woman who realises her dead-end life needs fixing. Terpstra takes an almost nonchalant approach, writing with brutal honesty and a cold, sometimes laconic tone that unsettles as much as it moves. More than anything, this is a portrait of one woman&#039;s courageous search for a better life.<ul><li>A candid book that is as raw as it is full of hope</li><li>A new, young voice in Frisian literature</li><li>Semi-autobiographical: Terpstra draws on her own experiences with addiction and loss</li></ul>

A debut to remember – an instant classic. Reminiscent of Tove Ditlevsen's celebrated Copenhagen Trilogy: a literary adventure through a young woman's life that tests your pain threshold.

Terpstra maintains just the right distance to give an almost unfeeling description of Geller's experiences, allowing the reader to form their own opinion.

A subtle yet profound portrayal of a young woman's life — remarkably lucid, objective and, ultimately, hopeful.

This debut novel by a young Frisian female author is raw, poignant and shamelessly honest – but above all, full of hope

Hille Faber

Geller

Gabriëlle Terpstra is a rising star in Frisian literature. In a humorous, compassionate and crisp style, she tells a story about being born to addicts, childhood poverty, self-medication and sex.

Joke van Vliet

In 25 short chapters, Joke van Vliet builds her portrait slowly, moving between the present squalor of Daan&#039;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&#039;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&#039;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&#039;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.<ul><li>Gripping and harrowing novel about intergenerational trauma and the expectations of motherhood</li><li>Powerfully cinematographic and fragmented writing</li><li>Shortlisted for the BNG Literatuurprijs 2025</li></ul>

At its core, the book is driven by the struggles of a woman with two irreconcilable forces: those of mother and artist.

An impressive work of literature by an author who should be more widely read.

A staggering story.

Impressive debut novel about a woman’s reflection on her tattered life

Martijn Prins

Niets is echt gebeurd

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.

Nothing Really Happened

Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad

Boiling Point brings together seven stories set in various places and various moments in time, from 1961 in Algeria to 2061 in Amsterdam. While the title story is a brutal indictment of the genocide in Palestine, another tells the story of the woman who, after purchasing a house in the French countryside, drifts into memories of the Moroccan village where she spent her youth.The protagonist of another chapter loses the love of his life to nuclear tests given the green light by the French government in the Algerian Sahara. Introducing a multitude of characters, the author shows with singular power how the inevitable consequences of history reverberate for generations.The book also focuses on multilingualism and the way in which language connects us to places and identities. Each chapter of this novel offers a new and unexpected perspective, addressing the impact of colonialism and the loving, complex human relationships that have withstood the unpredictable course of history.<ul><li>Seven stories, one century: from 1961 Algeria to 2061 Amsterdam</li><li>A debut that spans continents, generations and languages</li></ul><ul><li>Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad: poet laureate, translator, and now novelist</li></ul>

A gorgeous literary landscape uniting the personal with the universal. The evocative style and astute writing bring scents and fragrances to life. In one story, you can smell the sardines on toast.

Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad’s debut novel Kookpunt showcases her impressive palette of skills as an author.

With tact and precision, she gives her characters a unique yet relatable voice that is finely attuned to the time and period in which the stories take place.

A tapestry of subtle and light yet hard-hitting material. Against the backdrop of world history, Mbarki Ben Ayad immerses readers in stories of life, death and all possible facets of human life and love.

World history plays an ever-present role in this novel’s intimate yet universal stories

Kookpunt

Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad makes her debut with this novel that weaves a sumptuous web of stories about love, mourning and solace. Nothing short of a linguistic explosion, the book creates connections between its characters in countless ways.

Boiling Point

Thijs Hoekstra

David is fourteen years old. As he looks at the world he now inhabits, he feels a mix of shock, cynicism, disgust... and wonder. A life full of hospital clichés, chemo treatments with names like Harry Potter spells, worried parents, hospital clowns, classmates and his years-long crush on a girl who’s out of his league. That frustration feeds the most embittered yet delightfully vicious observations by a character who becomes more endearing from one page to the next. Such as this sentence: ‘Haarlem, the city you move to when you’ve decided to let your dreams die.’ Hoekstra’s unique style comes to the fore in this semi-autobiographical novel that contains scenes that are so harrowing, you’ve got to laugh to hide your tears.David’s resistance to the beautiful and safe yet profoundly dull provincial city of his youth reflects his deep urge to spread his wings. Every line makes it clear how his cynicism is a defence against sliding into desperation and self-pity. Remedies is a book that makes you laugh and cry – often at the same time.<ul><li>Poignant coming-of-age story about a seriously ill fourteen-year-old boy</li><li>Critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical story</li></ul>

In his cynical take on the world, the protagonist has traits of Holden Caulfield or Tommy Wieringa’s Joe Speedboot. The book offers a light, upbeat take on deeply troubling material.

A warts-and-all coming-of-age story that rejects the typical schmalz of medical fiction. A humorous yet deeply revealing book.

A raw and moving book that takes no prisoners. A coming-of-age novel in the form of an feverish monologue.

A moving coming-of-age debut novel and a bitter comedy, written from the trenches of puberty

Kuren

A blend of humour and heartbreak, Remedies tells the story of David, a 14-year-old boy who grows up in a provincial family of artists. In one long and lively stream of consciousness, he speaks of his desire to experience the full reality of life, until that reality hits home – in the form of cancer.

Remedies

Xillan Macrooy

The novel tells the story of Lanny, a Surinamese boy struggling with his identity and sexuality. Lanny grows up with his twin brother in Paramaribo. The boys are talented; they are visual artists and earn fame as a singing duo. But as they become older, Lanny gradually withdraws deeper and deeper into the lunar side of life: he doesn’t believe he is a sun.When the true meaning of the feelings he harbours for his best friend dawns on him, he enters a period in which everything feels worthless: music, the once all-consuming freedom of being a child, and even his bond with his twin brother.This story stands out thanks to its rich, sensorial and relentless stream of prose, poetry, diary excerpts and dialogues. Xillan’s writing style immerses the reader in the many worlds inhabited by the character: from the hammock under the mango tree by the blue house to his first date in the cold and bleak Netherlands. This book details the wonderful and complex journey of an unforgettable character. <ul><li>A unique voice: Sranan Tongo, Surinamese Dutch and Standard Dutch woven together</li><li>From Paramaribo to Amsterdam: a queer Black boy finds his place in the world</li><li>432 pages of poetry, prose, diary and dialogue — a world unto itself</li></ul>

Xillan Macrooy tells this coming-of-age story in a soaring, uncompromising and sure-footed way. The narrative drive bursts from every page. Macrooy instantly evokes smells, colours, feelings — and what a generous talent he is.

Macrooy paints a colourful and deeply insightful story that offers a sensorial experience of life as a queer Surinamese boy growing up in Paramaribo. Sun People and Moon People is an impressive and poetic debut whose legacy will continue to resonate for some time yet.

Utterly thrilling, exciting and sensual writing. What a joy to hear such a fresh Surinamese voice in modern Dutch literature!

I want people to understand just how special this book is. It is a watershed moment.’

Mensen als zonnen en mensen als manen

Evocatively and poetically written, Sun People an Moon People shows how language can offer shelter to us all, a home for the many tales of our secret or hidden lives. Xillan Macrooy lays bare the fears and desires of a young Black queer man.

Sun People and Moon People

Adriaan van Dis

When Eefje is diagnosed with a terminal illness, she signs herself into a hospice to receive the care she needs – and have a place to host her admirer. They undertake their last journey together, back in time: to their trips around the world, to their traumatic youths, to their early romances. Told in great detail, for the first time, as death awaits. The conversations reveal why they – two people who had to grieve too soon, who grew up in broken homes and who shrouded themselves in a persistent air of mystery – were always meant for each other.Everything for the trip bundles romance, grief and self-portrait into one. Van Dis’s choppy style and brief, fragmented chapters offer an accurate portrayal of the end of life. He writes about the beauty of a romance kept alive by its limitations – never stagnant, forever a work in progress. At the same time, he shows the systematic erasing of Eefje as a woman and director and how the men she managed rose to fame rather than her.<ul><li>Themes: unconventional love, mourning, literature and poetry, sexual fluidity, the invisibility of female artists</li><li>75.000 copies sold so far</li><li>#1 bestseller upon publication</li><li>An instant topic of conversation in all major Dutch media outlets</li></ul>

A sublime novel, not only about “love and lies” but also about decline and death.

Van Dis creates a monument to a love that existed outside the confines of the ordinary.

That complexity, captured by Van Dis in so few and such simple words, is what makes this novel so good.

A powerful, poetic novel written with a palpable urgency. A declaration of love to a temperamental woman who was unable to choose.

A poetic novel about a secret romance that lasted nearly forty years

Hayo Deinum

For almost forty years, Adriaan van Dis kept the love of his life a secret. Now, following her death, he revives her in this poetic novel about an extraordinary three-way relationship. They meet in the 80s on the set of a TV and literature programme – she, Eefje, is the director; he is the presenter. They fall in love, but Eefje stays with ‘the Other’, with a capital O, as the narrator insists on calling him.

Everything for the Trip

Teddy Tops

In an attempt to give some coherence to her identity, she begins to rewrite the lives of her grandmothers Levi and Jo. What if they had met each other instead of their spouses? What if they had been free to live their lives as they wished?Grandma Levi bears her own unbearable loss: one of a ten-year-old Jewish girl who, one morning, arrived at her school to find the yard deserted. She spent the war living with anyone who would give her a place to hide. After liberation, she regularly returned to the bridge where she had last seen her mother. Maybe, just maybe, she’d find her there.Compelling in its quiet intensity, Tops’s novel consists of two parts – Aboveground and Underground – in which time becomes fluid and the boundaries between memory, figment of imagination and longing blur. The novel’s seven chapters take us through each passing minute of the car accident: as the first-person narrator and her parents sink deeper, we experience moments of extraordinary silence and concentration.<ul><li>A debut that is rare in its literary maturity and highly acclaimed by the Dutch press</li><li>Themes: intergenerational trauma, Jewish experience of WWII, mourning, female identity, the unreliable narrator</li><li>160 pages — dense, poetic and exceptionally ripe for multiple readings</li></ul>

Tops combines a compact writing style with fluid prose, distilling an incredible amount of life into 157 pages.

What if women in post-war Europe had been free to choose their own path? Teddy Tops’s heartfelt novel explores that possibility.

Ernaux, and then some.

A moving and inventive debut novel about the search for missing origins

Egelskop

The anonymous first-person narrator in Teddy Tops’s debut novel is the sole survivor of a car crash that kills her parents, leaving her – just four years old – with only a handful of memories that she can’t be sure are true. Each time she replays them in her mind, they appear in a different setting or feature different cast members. How can she know where she really comes from?

Arrowhead

Anja Meulenbelt

The author was sixteen when she fell pregnant and felt she had no choice but to marry the violent father of her child. What follows is an unflinching account of that marriage, her escape from it, and her years as a single working mother in a world built by and for men. She writes about desire and the female body, about money and class, about the particular exhaustion of fighting on every front at once. And she writes about shame — and what happens when it finally lifts.&#039;I see,&#039; she writes, &#039;in piercingly bright spotlights, magnified tenfold, the details of my oppression, the details of other women&#039;s pain. I have no more defenses against it, no blinkers. I am submerged in it like a mollusk without a shell. Self-pity? For sure, I could swim in self-pity. Vindictive? That, too. But no shame. The shame is over.&#039;The book&#039;s power lies not just in what Meulenbelt describes, but in how she describes it — raw, direct, and resolutely subjective at a time when women were expected to be neither. In an era of renewed attacks on reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and hard-won gender equality, The Shame is Over reads less like a historical document than a dispatch from the present.<ul><li>Reprint of the 1976 feminist classic on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary</li><li>Winner of the P.C. Hooftprijs (2024), the Netherlands&#039; highest literary honour for a body of work</li><li>US rights: Astra House Publishing | German rights: BTB/Penguin Random House | Italian rights: Fazi Editore</li></ul>

Meulenbelt's nascent language must not be viewed as aloof or analytical, but sincerely engaged, synthesising and consciously subjective.

A candid, shameless and extremely well-written book about the life of an ordinary woman, with all the misery and inequality that typified the 60s and 70s — and is sadly becoming ever more typical today.

The impact of this book cannot be overestimated.

The feminist classic that changed everything — back in print fifty years after it first shook the world

Willem Bisseling

De schaamte voorbij

In 1976, a young woman wrote a book about her own life and inadvertently ignited a movement. The Shame is Over — the account of Anja Meulenbelt's coming-of-age as a woman, a mother, and a feminist — became an international bestseller overnight and established her as one of the defining voices of second-wave feminism.

The Shame is Over: A Political Life Story

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