When as a young girl Ina loses her parents, she is taken to live with her grandfather and his two sisters in the religiously fundamentalist countryside. God watches over all that she does and says. The outside world is held at bay, and with neither radio nor television allowed, it is the village clergyman who dominates. Despite her doubts, as Ina grows up, she holds on to her faith. At the same time, we read about her later life as Gina, her studies at university and how she makes the transi­ tion to a world without faith, even becom­ ing the interviewer for a popular radio programme.

But then she unexpectedly loses in quick succession her lover and then her job. When she returns to Zeeland to look after her sick aunt, she is back in the bosom of the faith which she had aban­doned. This leads to crisis. She cannot accept the loss of her lover, even though she had never really given him a chance. His loss now awakens a passion for him that she had not previously known.

As in Treur’s previous novels, Now Hear My Voice deals with the impossible situation of people who cannot submit to the discipline of faith and unconditional surrender to God, and are left with an abyss of spiritual emptiness which is so typical of our society.

Now Hear My Voice is a classic novel about an uprooted life, a sense of sin, and a distancing from childhood and faith. The climax of this memorably and evocatively written story – when Gina’s aunt dies and the narrator gives herself over to a series of reflections on the impossibility of a divine being – lends the book a special, consoling power.