ABOUT
THE BOOK

A Dutch woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. She is a lecturer doing some research, and sets about making the farmhouse more homely. When she arrives there are ten geese living in the garden but one by one they disappear. Perhaps it’s the work of a local fox.

She has fled from an unbearable situation having recently confessed to an affair with one of her students. In Amsterdam, her stunned husband forms a strange partnership with a detective who agrees to help him trace her. They board the ferry to Hull on Christmas Eve.

Back on the farm, a young man out walking with his dog injures himself and stays the night, then ends up staying longer. Yet something is deeply wrong. Does he know what he is getting himself into? And what will happen when her husband and the policeman arrive?

Judges’ Comments

In The Detour, previous IMPAC winner Gerbrand Bakker delivers a moving, powerful tale about a mysterious woman who decamps from the Netherlands to north Wales. She rents an old cottage and starts doing up the garden and tending some geese, even though her tenancy will be for a short time. For a while, as her day-to-day life is described in oblique but crystalline language, we wonder why she is there, but slowly the awful truth starts to dawn. Meanwhile, various visitors or intruders disturb her lonely passion, including a lecherous farmer and an odd young man who becomes her lover. This is a quiet, but strangely dangerous book that creeps up on the reader, just as fate creeps up on its principal character. Once read, The Detour stays in the mind.