‘The Remembered Soldier’ Included in The New York Times' List of 100 Most Remarkable Books
28 November 2025
‘The Remembered Soldier’ by Anjet Daanje, translated by David McKay, has been mentioned as one of the most notable books of 2025 by the New York Times Book Review. The newspaper describes the book as “a provocatively labyrinthine novel” and “ loaded with tragic irony”. The Remembered Soldier was a National Book Award 2025 finalist as well. The novel was translated into English with support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
The Remembered Soldier is an extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination. Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?
Anjet Daanje (b. 1965) writes novels, short stories and screenplays. Her breakthrough novel ‘The Remembered Soldier’ won the 2020 F. Bordewijk Prize and the Best Book of Groningen Prize and was longlisted for the 2020 Libris Literature Prize. Earlier this year, the book was shortlisted for the National Book Award.
The Remembered Soldier was not only translated into English but also into Bulgarian by Maria Nechkova-Raven and German Ulrich Faure. These translations were funded through our Translation Grants for Foreign Publishers.
