The Dutch Maiden - Tapa blanda

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

"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

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.

Marente de Moor worked as a correspondent in Saint Petersburg for many years and wrote a book based on her experiences. The Dutch Maiden sold over 70,000 copies in the Netherlands and was awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize along with the European Union Prize for Literature. Her work has been translated into ten languages.