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Manik Sarkar

As a young boy, Rensing grows interested in the question of how to end an animal’s life as skilfully as possible. One day, a bird hits the window of his classroom. Their teacher snaps the bird’s neck to put it out of its misery. The students are shocked – how could he do such a thing? A little later, Rensing says, in what he believes to be a quite normal contribution to the conversation, ‘He should have just smashed its brains in from behind with a little hammer.’ From that moment on he is seen as an outsider. He graduates from his butchery course with top marks and the time has come for his parents to pass on the reins of the family business. He needs a woman by his side to help keep things going, and his parents have someone in mind, Jacomine, whom he ends up asking out on a date. They become involved, though they aren’t in love. Jacomine starts working behind the counter and before long knows the locals better than her fiancé does. Then Rensing finds himself facing two setbacks: his father dies suddenly and the town gets a supermarket. He is the owner of the shop now, but the business is barely breaking even. Rensing believes in the quality of his pricy meat and tries to restructure the business. After taking out a loan he finds himself saddled with a heavy debt, which leads to discord between him and Jacomine. And then a second supermarket opens nearby. ‘For you, there are only two people in this world: you and not-you,’ Jacomine tells him one day, before packing her bags. The times are changing: Rensing begins stocking meat substitutes to cater to flexitarians but he continues to struggle financially, and now he’s on his own. ‘Real loneliness comes from within and there’s nothing, nothing, nothing that can make it any better,’ he reflects. That thought ultimately leads to an act through which he becomes one with his beloved animals.Rights 2Seas AgencyMarleen Seegers marleen.seegers@2seasagency.com

A brilliant debut about an endearingly ambitious butcher. Sarker’s prose is impressive, and he is a skilled storyteller: building suspense, raising the stakes (cliffhangers!), letting the reader read between the lines and drawing wholly believable characters.

A classic rise-and-fall narrative. Love of animals, bloodlust, craftsmanship, eroticism – in the book’s finest moments, all of these come together.

Sarkar is an unflinching storyteller. You won’t find a single comma out of place. A book to read and reread, again, and again and again.

Book

Fiction

Debut novel about a butcher’s son devoted to his job and blind to the world around him

Asset

Assets

Ossenkop

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.

Oxhead

Thomas Heerma van Voss

It’s an emerging writer’s dream: becoming the editor in-chief of a literary magazine, discussing copy with colleagues, making a name for yourself among the intelligentsia and taking your first steps in the literary world. When Pierre Rosenau is invited to join the editorial team for Arabesque magazine, he is thrilled. But nearly five decades after first appearing on the Dutch literary scene, the once-thriving publication’s print run is low and they only have a handful of subscribers left. The new editorial team tries to turn the tide and give Arabesque a fresh lease on life. But it proves to be an uphill battle – despite having a new publisher, arts funding and ‘exciting new plans’ to reach a broader readership, their efforts seem to be falling flat. Meeting over drinks, they find themselves wondering whether they’re ‘breathing new life into the magazine or just giving it a last hurrah.&#039; Pierre is close with his introverted father, who used to be editor-in-chief of a literary magazine himself and continues to live in the past. They share their love of literature, but they’re also both men stuck on the sidelines of life, ‘staring silently into the middle distance.’ The magazine’s demise and Pierre’s decision to quit his job unfold in tandem with his father’s illness, a painful process which Heerma van Voss describes with tenderness and poignancy. Over the course of his life, Pierre’s father amassed his own vast, rather chaotic private archive, governed by a logic all his own. His efforts sometimes met with irritation or bewilderment from his loved ones, but he was adamant that it was all filed away ‘for later use.’ His son eventually realises that this feverish collecting was in fact only relevant to himself – and comes to appreciate how that is nonetheless beautiful in its own way. Ultimately, this is a novel about the comfort of ephemerality and celebrating what’s important to you – even if no one else cares about it.

Sample Translation

Paper is paper, but the attention we give to the things that are valuable to us – no matter how fragile or useless 
they may be – makes us human. Thomas Heerma van Voss wrote an outstanding book about it.

A touching chronicle of an ending as well as a brilliant paean to holding onto what you love, written in luminous prose.

A stunning ode to toiling away in the margins.

A literary magazine, a private archive, and letting go of what’s about to disappear forever

Het archief

One of the books that featured in several Dutch critics’ end-of-year lists was The Archive. Praised for his precise style and melancholy wit, Thomas Heerma van Voss describes the life of the aspiring editor of a literary magazine who has to say goodbye to his reclusive father.

The Archive

Joost Oomen

The protagonists of this novel are Gerrit Blauw and Theo Engel. Gerrit is in his early seventies and has lived a pleasant, seemingly untroubled life. One day, out of the blue, he writes a letter to Theo, requesting this doctor assist him in suicide. This would of course be illegal, because there is nothing wrong with Gerrit. He’s not sick, nor is he in unbearable psychological distress – the two situations that allow for assisted dying in the Netherlands. But he feels that he’s done on this earth and simply wants to be able to ‘die a good death’. The passages that look back on his boyhood make it abundantly clear that Gerrit has had a long and happy life. Oomen sets up a series of memorable images, such as playing hide-and-seek on a farm and, by chance, settling on the same hiding place as the girl he was in love with. Sweet moments like these are alternated with more surreal yet equally memorable imagery, such as a giraffe on a ferry to Terschelling, a small island off the coast of the Netherlands, where the African animal then vanishes without a trace. Gerrit has savored the beauty of this world, and he is at peace knowing that it will go on after he’s gone. As a reader, you gradually come to understand where he’s coming from. You also understand Theo, who ultimately decides to flout all the rules and accede to Gerrit’s request, so he can finally get to see someone leave this world peacefully.

Joost Oomen has managed to write a light-footed, cheerful novel about assisted dying, which shows how to celebrate a life – and let it go.

It’s a pleasure to spend time in one of Oomen’s magical-realist universes, where he gently teaches you to live with greater wonder. Oomen shows us how to see the beauty of everyday life through different eyes, all while a keen sense of social justice thrums beneath the surface.

A lyrical meditation on death, literature, beauty and love.

A gripping novel about beauty, love and...  euthanasia

Het paradijs van het slapen

The poet Joost Oomen writes cheerful books. He even manages to spin the tale of a jaded euthanasia doctor who has seen too much into an entertaining, infectious yarn.

The Paradise of Sleep

Leonieke Baerwaldt

Sisyphus’ memory is riddled with gaps. In flashes, she remembers the birth of her daughter Mia, the euphoria, the first few weeks. Slowly, the other stuff starts coming back, too – the endless doctor’s appointments and conflicting diagnoses. She reconstructs how Mia slowly transformed into a case study for the medical world. Sisyphus herself also initially finds herself taking an almost clinical approach, but gradually develops a deep emotional bond with her daughter: ‘A lot of the time, you defy comprehension, but every now and then I’ll find you in certain sounds, a small gesture you make just for me, something we practiced together until we seemed to understand one another. Meaning emerges through repetition.’ The novel is fragmented in style, with brief, numbered chapters which are sometimes reminiscent of poetry or journal entries. In the second part, we witness Sisyphus wandering endlessly through a largely deserted city in search of her daughter, whom she’s supposed to pick up from daycare. In this nightmare, Sisyphus’ landlady also plays an important role as both adversary and ally at the same time. Together they head for the sea in hopes of finally finding Mia and closing the gaps in Sisyphus’ memory. Days Like Strange Symptoms is a fairytale and a philosophical novel rolled into one, in the tradition of Greek mythology and Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Leonieke Baerwaldt adds a fresh new perspective to this trope with an account of raising a child with multiple disabilities that is in equal parts sensitive and unflinching.

Where Baerwaldt’s debut elevated an everyday story into the realm of fairytale – complete with mermaids – in her second novel this marriage between realism and the symbolic is even more convincing. Like a professional assassin, this novel sneaks up on you, taking perfect aim at your head and heart.

Baerwaldt shows how we use stories to fool ourselves, but how those same stories also hold the truth. At the same time, you can move between past and present, space and time, life and death. There’s always hope.

A strangely wonderful novel.

Tragedy and levity in a magical-realist  story about a mother raising a child with multiple disabilities

Dagen als vreemde symptomen

In this unique novel, we see Sisyphus like we’ve never seen him – or rather, her – before. Baerwaldt’s Sisyphus is not the man forced to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity that keeps rolling back, but a modern mother aimlessly wandering around an inhospitable universe, pushing an empty wheelchair.

Days Like Strange Symptoms

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