Winner of the European Union Prize in Literature
"Addictive (...) Janna's plight is that of Jane Eyre and the narrator of du Maurier's "Rebecca." She is a young woman who falls in love with an older man so damaged he cannot possibly be good for her. Fencing and love. Battle and desire. The combination transforms Janna's attempts at love into a match of skill, a game that leaves one bloody and scarred, giving the novel a cruel beauty. (...) One of the most delicious novels I've read in ages" Danielle Trussoni for the New York Times Book Review
Germany, 1936. Nazism is taking hold. Janna, a young Dutch girl, has been sent to the embittered aristocrat Egon von Bötticher to train as a fencer. Bötticher is as eccentric as his training methods, yet the pupil soon finds herself falling for her master-a man tormented by a wartime past in which Janna's father is implicated. Enthralled and disturbed by this dark world with its strange codes of honor and cruel rites of passage, Janna battles to understand her own desires and her part in the strange relationship between her father and the man who has become her obsession. A masterfully written story that sparkles and effervesces.
Germany, 1936. Nazism is taking hold. Janna, a young Dutch girl, has been sent to the embittered aristocrat Egon von Bötticher to train as a fencer. Bötticher is as eccentric as his training methods, yet the pupil soon finds herself falling for her master-a man tormented by a wartime past in which Janna's father is implicated. Enthralled and disturbed by this dark world with its strange codes of honor and cruel rites of passage, Janna battles to understand her own desires and her part in the strange relationship between her father and the man who has become her obsession. A masterfully written story that sparkles and effervesces.
A darkly obsessive novel about a girl training as a fencer on the eve of the Second World War...De Moor's novel has darkly gothic overtones, reminiscent in places of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights..."-Kirkus Reviews
"...it is Janna's intense emotional world, the foreboding atmosphere of pre-World War II Germany and the richness of de Moor's imagination that make The Dutch Maiden one of the most delicious novels I've read in ages." -Danielle Trussoni, The New York Times
"With Marente de Moor, Dutch literature has won a very original writer, one with an apparently inexhaustible imagination, who will, hopefully, write many more novels as exhilarating as this one." -Trouw
"An ominous atmosphere, moral dilemmas, raging passions-all evoked by beautifully sculpted sentences' -NRC Handelsblad
"A masterfully written story that sparkles and effervesces, demonstrating the richness of the language on every page" -Limburgs Dagblad
"De Moor's nature metaphors are of an animalistic power, her reflections are as clever as they are distinctive, and how she evokes the sultry, stormy atmosphere on the eve of World War II testifies to her great storytelling ability" -Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
"A fascinating read: a gothic romance transplanted to 1930s Germany. De Moor has lined up all the essential gothic elements-powerful currents of sexuality, a rambling old house, a possibly treacherous servant, a dark and brooding man whose true affinity is with the wildness of nature-and sent them on a collision course with concepts that come from somewhere else entirely" -The Herald Scotland
"The Dutch Maiden has beautifully constructed chapters, which have been preserved in translation: an interesting, recommended read" -Dutch News
"Mysteries, intrigues, old wounds, new wounds, tension, and sensation. The Dutch Maiden reads smoothly and swallows you up completely" -Pink Bullets
