Dutch Fiction
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. Dutch Fiction is distributed to international editors and publishers.
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.
Oxhead
In this superbly written debut, we meet a butcher who lives for his craft – he wants to provide the best meat from animals who have had a good life and are slaughtered as humanely as possible. After finishing butchery college, he will be taking over his parents’ business. He has a brilliant future ahead of him.
The Instructions
‘You’re not alone, you’re part of something bigger.’ This is Mol talking, a slightly nerdy teacher who finds himself getting involved with a group of radical animal rights activists at the behest of his childhood friend, Nora. The story begins with him trying to clamber out of a ditch in pitch blackness, dressed in a pink pig suit after an arson attack on the biggest slaughterhouse in the Netherlands.
Hard Skin
Sarlag is a 26-year-old woman working in the freezer section of a grocery store somewhere in the middle of the Netherlands. She seems completely ordinary. With a cool, detached gaze, she observes her surroundings and thinks about yaks, those loyal animals with their white fur that live on the steppes of Mongolia, where she grew up.
Men Ruin Everything
David is a visual artist who lives in a manicured neighbourhood ‘where the streets smell like diaper cream’. He is neither productive nor successful and has a trivial job in an art gallery. His life changes when a group of rowdy youths start hanging out outside his window every night. David finds himself equal parts annoyed and fascinated.
Wondermond
Boye de Koning (18) and his wealthy parents live a carefree life in an upscale seaside town. Everything changes when his father is arrested for large-scale investment fraud and all their assets are seized. Boye and his mother start over in the village of Wondermond in Friesland, where they move in with Boye’s grandmother in a tumbledown cottage.
The Floodplains
After successful novels about the sea and the mountains, Toine Heijmans takes his readers into the foreshore, the area between the dike and the river. Here, Willem de Waal lives in a tent beneath the shelter of a centuries-old black poplar. He is young and strong and lives in harmony with nature, by the rhythm of the tides and the seasons, far away from the hubbub of modern society.
In the Eye
Relationships are a careful balancing act: what should you say and what is best kept to yourself? Should you share everything with your partner or is it acceptable to keep some things secret? That is the key question in acclaimed author Marijke Schermer’s riveting fourth novel.
Temekoe
‘Trees that don’t grow in step with the forest become isolated, wither, die.’ This line is emblematic of the novel Temekoe (1979) by the Surinamese author Edgar Cairo, which has recently been republished. It tells the story of a complex father-son relationship, while at the same time painting a portrait of a society after the abolition of slavery, which continues to leave profound psychological wounds.
The Rescuer
In Deen’s sublime third Wadden Sea thriller, a mystery unfolds against a spectacular backdrop. The psychological depth and literary brilliance of Deen’s works are reminiscent of the great Scandinavian authors in the genre. longside the murder case – below the surface of the water, if you will – he constructs a riveting psychological drama.
Mondrian: A Better World
The world-renowned painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) believed it was an artist’s duty to strive for harmony and equilibrium in art, in order that it could serve as a blueprint for human society. His way to achieve this was to strip his work of all noise and distraction and use only universal shapes and primary colours.