My Heavenly Favorite: A Novel

"Speaking of International Booker Prize-winners, I was delighted to learn that there will be a new Lucas Rijneveld book: My Heavenly Favourite . Rijneveld won it in 2020 with the same translator, Michele Hutchison, for The Discomfort of Evening , a staggering and sometimes shocking story set in a small, religious Dutch farming community. My Heavenly Favourite has a similar setting, drawing from Rijneveld’s own rural upbringing, and is narrated by a large animal vet in the wake of his criminal obsession with a farmer’s young daughter: a cowshit-splashed Lolita . The Financial Times called it a “tender but terrifying, tumbling monologue…an uneasy voyage inside the mind and—however distasteful it is for us to go there—the heart of a paedophile.” Rijneveld’s writing is not for the faint-hearted, but I wouldn’t miss it for the world. A ‘lost’ novel by the Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez will be published in English in March, ten years after his death, and reportedly against the wishes of the author himself . Márquez suffered with dementia in his final years, and may have feared the critical response to Until August , but his sons have explained that they feel this final book to be “the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds” and deemed it too precious to remain hidden in an archive."