The Opposite of a Person

If people were evil, and I wished to be good, then I had to make sure that I was the opposite of a person.

When Ida, a Dutch climatologist, accepts an internship at a climate research institute in the Italian Alps, it means leaving her girlfriend Robin behind in Amsterdam. As she and her new colleagues prepare to demolish a decommissioned hydropower dam, Ida finds herself grappling with love, loneliness and her place in a society unwilling to confront global warming.

An unflinchingly honest narrative of vulnerability, longing and introspection is disrupted by essays and poems, creating an incisive, witty and devastatingly smart portrait of how we live now. Distilling all our contemporary fears, Marsman examines what we must face head-on if we – individuals, humanity, the world – are to survive. And she asks us: if we are to survive, what is our impetus? For what are we fighting?

Startlingly unique, timely and ultimately deeply moving, The Opposite of a Person is a dazzling, cerebral tour-de-force, a poignant love story and an urgent, unforgettable call to arms.

‘Gorgeous . . . stunning . . . An existentialist, essential story about the world we live in, which explores the complex role and place of us humans in it.’ --Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning The Discomfort of Evening

‘Swirling, stirring, surprising, The Opposite of a Person channels its forked curiosity into asking not only how a person should be, what a society should do, but also what a book can and should accomplish. A novel for the end-times, in the best possible way.’ --Polly Barton, author of Fifty Sounds

‘The experience of reading The Opposite of a Person is like walking on shifting ground. It’s unnerving, dynamic, almighty in its force. I was consumed by this book.’ --Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

‘Relentlessly inventive . . . Wry, spirited, troubling and a marker of an intriguing new talent.’ --Irish Times

‘A fizzing tale of heartbreak and climate disaster . . . inventive, and excellent . . . bask in its fizzing multiplicity: the narrative is interspliced with poems and script-like dialogue, and stippled with quotes from Kierkegaard, Leopardi and Naomi Klein.’ --Daily Telegraph

‘It feels in a sense like the most modern book you could read . . . Marsman writes powerfully on natural as well as man-made disasters. The essays spliced through the fiction are complex and rewarding and, like the narrative, address the question of belonging, reflecting, for example, on the limits of identity politics.’ --Observer

‘An extraordinary and gripping novel of ideas.’ --NRC Handelsblad

Lieke Marsman is a Dutch writer and the current Poet Laureate of the Netherlands. Marsman is considered one of the greatest new voices in Dutch literature. She published her first poetry volume Things That I Tell Myself at twenty years old, and promptly won three poetry prizes. In 2018 Lieke was diagnosed with bone cancer. The months following the diagnosis she wrote The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes, which was translated into English by Sophie Collins and published by Liverpool University Press. The Opposite of a Person was longlisted for the ECI Literature Prize. Lieke currently lives in Amsterdam.

Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland. She is the author of Who Is Mary Sue? (Faber, 2018) and small white monkeys (Book Works, 2017), and the editor of Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), an anthology of contemporary poetry translations. She is the translator, from the Dutch, of Lieke Marsman’s The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes and of essays by Marsman and Mieke van Zonneveld for an edition of Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill (Uitgeverij HetMoet, 2021). She is a lecturer at the University of Glasgow.