Böcker av Lucas Rijneveld

I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough, how many centimetres on the doorpost that was, and I asked God if he please couldn't take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit.

A harrowing, unforgettable masterpiece by the winner of the Booker International PrizeA confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, My Heavenly Favorite is the remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld's international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his "Favorite"-the farmer's daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy's body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.Narrated after the veterinarian has been punished for his crimes, Rijneveld's audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Rijneveld refracts the contours of the Lolita story with a kind of perverse glee, taking the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces full of pop lyrics, horror novels, the Favorite's fantasized conversations with Freud and Hitler, and her dreams of flight and destruction and transcendence.An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favorite establishes Rijneveld as one of the most daring and brilliant writers on the world stage.

WINNER OF THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZEA stark and gripping tale of childhood grief from one of the most exciting new voices in Dutch literatureTen-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world: her face soft like cheese under her mother's hands; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads in the village; the sound of "blush words" that aren't in the Bible.One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family's life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame. As her parents' suffering makes them increasingly distant, Jas and her siblings develop a curiosity about death that leads them into disturbing rituals and fantasies. Cocooned in her red winter coat, Jas dreams of "the other side" and of salvation, not knowing where this dreaming will finally lead her.A bestseller in the Netherlands, Lucas Rijneveld's radical debut novel The Discomfort of Evening offers readers a rare vision of rural and religious life in the Netherlands. In it, he asks: In the absence of comfort and care, what can the mind of a child invent to protect itself? And what happens when that is not enough? With stunning psychological acuity and images of haunting, violent beauty, Rijneveld has created a captivating world of language unlike any other.