Description
Backstory pick
By a whisker, our favourite novel published in hardback this year is also our bestselling hardback of the year. Which seems about right. If you haven’t heard me bang on about it already, this is an engrossing, claustrophobic novel set in the Dutch countryside in the early 1960s, where a young woman tends the family home, long after her mother died and her brothers moved out. When her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay, odd things begin to happen… Tom
It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season… In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel's desperate need for control reaches boiling point.
What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.