The Twin - Couverture rigide

Bakker, Gerbrand

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1846551374 ISBN 13 : 9781846551376

Editeur : Harvill Secker, 2008

A propos du livre

Quatrième de couverture :

[An] unusual, memorable novel... Loneliness, combined with the beauty of the landscape, creates an atmosphere of inchoate yearning - Guardian

This is a quiet book, humble in tone, with a fine, self-deprecating humour... It leaves the reader touched and with the impression of having seen and smelled the ever-damp Dutch platteland - TLS

Bakker's outstanding debut novel, set in the Dutch countryside, is one of those rare works of fiction that everyone should read - Irish Times

It could so easily be a bleak tale of regret but Bakker's spartan prose eloquently conveys humour - Financial Times

Intensely moving and compelling - Literary Review

Helmer lives on a remote farm in the flat expanses of the Dutch Platteland with his elderly father, caring for a small flock of sheep and his two beloved donkeys. It is a life he did not wish for; forced to return home following the death of his twin brother many years before. Deciding a change is needed, Helmer moves his dying father to an upstairs room, and begins to decorate. One day, his brothers' former fiancée appears unannounced, with her teenage son. Choices appear before Helmer for the first time. Will he be able to seek the life he wants, or has it escaped his grasp?

Présentation de l'éditeur :

When Henk’s twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow’.

After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. ‘A double bed and a duvet’, advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm?

The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one’s own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Harvill Secker
• Date d'édition: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1846551374
• ISBN 13: 9781846551376
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 288