Author(s): Lucas Rijneveld (translated by Michele Hutchison)

Novel | Translated fiction | The Netherlands

The electrifying new novel from the winner of the International Booker Prize and sensational bestseller - a daring and unflinching account of loss, loneliness and the cost of survival.

I heard you laughing from time to time and you stayed lying there on the flattened hay, and after you left, your body's imprint was left behind, and I rested my hand on the dry blades of grass that were still slightly warm and I wanted to carry on feeling you forever, really I did, but everything changed when you began to speak to me, on 7 July to be precise.

In the tempestuous summer of 2005, on a day that is as hot as the inside of a bovine, a 14-year-old farmer's daughter makes friends with the local veterinarian who looks after her father's cows. He has reached 'the biblical age of seven times seven' and is trying to escape trauma, while she is trying to escape into a world of fantasy.

Their obsessive reliance on each other's stories builds into a terrifying trap, with a confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small Dutch community apart.

Indelible, audacious and impossible-to-put-down, this novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose. With its literary sleight and magnifying glass on human instinct, My Heavenly Favourite establishes Rijneveld as one of the bravest and most brilliant writers on the world stage.

Praise for The Discomfort of Evening:

'One of the best debut novels I have ever read: a classic.' - Max Porter

'Haunting . . . Like Iain Banks. It's incredible that it's a debut.' - Douglas Stuart

'Exceptional.' - Financial Times

”My Heavenly Favourite belongs to a tiny, controversial subgenre: novels about child sex abuse rendered in exquisite prose. It is all the more transgressive in that it’s narrated by the abuser, who addresses his victim in an incantatory, unflinchingly graphic second-person rant about his eternal love. Such a book has to clear a very high bar not to seem like a cynical exercise. Rijneveld’s novel leaps effortlessly over, with room to spare. What is truly extraordinary here is how, although the voice is Kurt’s, the ruling consciousness is Little Bird’s. … My Heavenly Favourite squares up deliberately to Lolita, citing it throughout, and Rijneveld compares well with Nabokov in the richness of his invention and the delicacy of his prose, while taking a much more serious approach to their shared subject. Indeed, Rijneveld conveys the squalor and despair of sexual violence with more fidelity than any other author I have read. But this novel is not only a surprisingly successful treatment of a difficult subject. It’s a unique creation and a tour de force of transgressive imagination – a dazzling addition to the oeuvre of an author of prodigious gifts.” —Sandra Newman, Guardian