My Heavenly Favourite

I heard you laughing from time to time and you stayed lying there on the flattened hay, and after you left, your body's imprint was left behind, and I rested my hand on the dry blades of grass that were still slightly warm and I wanted to carry on feeling you forever, really I did, but everything changed when you began to speak to me, on 7 July to be precise.

In the tempestuous summer of 2005, on a day that is as hot as the inside of a bovine, a 14-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 Dutch community apart.

Indelible, audacious and impossible-to-put-down, this novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose. With its literary sleight and magnifying glass on human instinct, My Heavenly Favourite establishes Rijneveld as one of the bravest and most brilliant writers on the world stage.

Praise for The Discomfort of Evening:
'One of the best debut novels I have ever read: a classic.' - Max Porter
'Haunting . . . Like Iain Banks. It's incredible that it's a debut.' - Douglas Stuart
'Exceptional.' - Financial Times
'Exhilarating.' - Independent
'Luminous.' - Observer
'Beautifully wild.' - Guardian

Author bio:

Lucas Rijneveld was born in 1991 in the Netherlands and grew up in a Reformed farming family. His first novel, The Discomfort of Evening, won the Booker International Prize 2020 and the ANV Debut Prize. In the same year the Dutch edition of My Heavenly Favourite was published and was shortlisted for the Libris Literature Prize and was awarded both the Boon and F. Bordewijk prizes. Rijneveld's work has been translated into 39 languages.