Description

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL

One morning Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, where twenty years previously he slept with another man’s wife. Yet he is quite certain that the night before he went to sleep as normal in his house in Amsterdam. And so Herman begins a physical journey and a metaphysical adventure, which will re-route him via past loves, through the pangs and pleasures of memory, and to the very heart of that crucial question: ‘who am I?’.

Publisher Review

One of the greatest modern novelists -- A. S. Byatt The prose has such clarity, charm and lightness that you take to disorientation with pleasure -- Michael Ignatieff * Sunday Times * After years of distinction in his own country, Cees Nooteboom has commanded attention with this gentle, European Literature Prize-winning story * Independent * He is a thinker as much as a storyteller and brings astute insight to his evocation of character and imaginative intellectualism... Playful, deadly serious and achingly real... Nooteboom makes every word, every observation, not only count but also linger * Irish Times * Nooteboom writes beautifully. His prose is clean and precise without feeling sparse, and he manages to combine clarity with an intense lyricism... Part travelogue, part elegy, part love story, this is an exquisite little novel, and far more substantial than its 90 pages suggest * Guardian *