My Heavenly Favourite
ABOUT
THE BOOK
In the tempestuous summer of 2005, a fourteen-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 community apart. Indelible, audacious and impossible-to-put-down, My Heavenly Favourite is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Michele
Hutchison
Michele Hutchison is an Amsterdam-based translator, editor and writer. She has translated more than forty books from Dutch including the winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize, The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld, the international bestseller Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and We Are Light by Gerda Blees (winner of the EU Prize for Literature). She is co-author of The Happiest Kids in the World and author of The North Wind (poetry).
Michele Hutchison is an Amsterdam-based translator, editor and writer. She has translated more than forty books from Dutch including the winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize, The Discomfort of Evening by Lucas Rijneveld, the international bestseller Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and We Are Light by Gerda Blees (winner of the EU Prize for Literature). She is co-author of The Happiest Kids in the World and author of The North Wind (poetry).
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
My Heavenly Favorite is a staggering book about a forbidden love. The harrowing confessions of a veterinarian obsessed with his love for his chosen one: a girl far too young, who seeks to escape the emptiness of her rural world, her dysfunctional family life, and her imposed identity. Her search for freedom gives the pedophilic My heavenly favorite is a staggering book about a forbidden love. The harrowing confessions of a veterinarian obsessed with his love for his chosen one: a girl far too young, who seeks to escape the emptiness of her rural world, her dysfunctional family life, and her imposed identity. Her search for freedom gives the pedophilic veterinarian the opportunity to manipulate her. Rijneveld’s masterful style draws the reader deeper into this story. The narrative perspective is that of the unreliable narrator, the veterinarian, and Rijneveld compels the reader to engage with his shocking defense of the indefensible. Through the detour of his troubled gaze, you gradually come to know the girl better. A worthy successor to Rijneveld’s debut novel The Discomfort of Evening. Like the debut, My Heavenly Favorite was translated by Michele Hutchison, who once again demonstrates her great creative translation skills, as Rijneveld’s Dutch is a challenge for any translator.