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2003 Longlist

Love’s Death

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ABOUT
THE BOOK

Love’s Death is about the search for an ideal family. At the novel’s centre is the death of a child and the devastating and destructive effect of this event on parents, friends and lovers.
In the summer on 1973, Oda and Paul Klein’s eight-year-old daughter, Vera, drowns in the neighbour’s pool. Paul flees his grief by taking a military posting in Suriname. Seven years later, when he returns, a mysterious fire burns down the neighbour’s house, and a young girl appears out of the flames. She is fifteen, as Vera would now have been. Paul and Oda agree to take her in temporarily – feeling as if they have been given another chance to form a family. Finally Paul’s friend Emil reveals the central role he has played in the Klein’s lives.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Oscar
Van Den Boogard

ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Ina
Rilke

Ina Rilke is a Mozambique-born translator who specializes in translating Dutch literature and French literature into English.

Born in Mozambique, she went to school in Porto in Portugal, attending Oporto British School. She studied translation at the University of Amsterdam, where she later taught.

Writers she has translated include Hafid Bouazza, Louis Couperus, Hella Haasse, W. F. Hermans, Arthur Japin, Erwin Mortier, Multatuli, Cees Nooteboom, Connie Palmen, Pierre Péju and Dai Sijie. Rilke has won the Vondel Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Flemish Culture Prize. She has also been nominated for the Best Translated Book Award, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the IMPAC Book Award.

Ina Rilke is a Mozambique-born translator who specializes in translating Dutch literature and French literature into English.

Born in Mozambique, she went to school in Porto in Portugal, attending Oporto British School. She studied translation at the University of Amsterdam, where she later taught.

Writers she has translated include Hafid Bouazza, Louis Couperus, Hella Haasse, W. F. Hermans, Arthur Japin, Erwin Mortier, Multatuli, Cees Nooteboom, Connie Palmen, Pierre Péju and Dai Sijie. Rilke has won the Vondel Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Flemish Culture Prize. She has also been nominated for the Best Translated Book Award, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the IMPAC Book Award.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Country
The Netherlands
Original Language
Dutch
Publisher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Translator
Ina Rilke

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