Homecoming

Anna Enquist studied piano at the academy of music in The Hague and psychology at Leiden University. She is the author of the novels The Masterpiece; The Secret, winner of the 1997 Dutch Book of the Year awarded by the public; The Ice Carriers; Counterpoint; Quartet; and the international bestseller The Homecoming, which received the Prix du Livre Corderie Royale-Hermione for its French translation. Anna is also the author of A Leap, a collection of dramatic monologues, as well as numerous poetry collections, including Soldiers’ Songs, for which she was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize; A New Goodbye; and Hunting Scenes, winner of the Lucy B. and C.W. van der Hoogt Prize.Eileen Stevens earned her MA in linguistics with a specialization in translation from the University of Amsterdam. Her many Dutch-to-English translation credits include Connie Palmen’s Your Story, My Story; Karin Schacknat’s In and Out of Fashion; Vera Mertens’s The Concentration Camp; and Ineke van Doorn’s Singing from the Inside Out. She has also translated numerous essays on classical music and the arts. In 2020, Eileen attended an intensive two-month master class on the translation of literary nonfiction hosted by the Dutch Centre of Expertise for Literary Translation (ELV). A New Jersey native, Eileen spent twenty-five years working as a professional violinist in a Dutch orchestra and has lived in Amsterdam since 1990. For more information, visit www.keyboardtranslations.com.

“This latest novel from the bestselling Dutch author is a long, lyrical meditation on mourning and identity…Like an 18th-century still life, this luminous novel captures in heartbreaking detail both the vibrancy of life and the poignancy of decay and loss.” —Historical Novel Society“[Anna Enquist’s] best, most comprehensive, and most touching novel.” —NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands)“A surprising and touching novel about the loss of children; about a ruined union between a man and a woman; and, above all, about the inadequacy of facts in helping to understand people.” —Haarlems Dagblad (The Netherlands)“Elizabeth is drawn so that she’s completely understandable even though the problems she faces are not of our time. She is more than a seaman’s wife left behind to care for the family. Sitting at home, she’s almost as much of an explorer as her husband, and on one point she outdoes him: as a survivor, as a fighter against death. In the end, she knew more than James Cook about the nakedness of existence.” —Max Pam, HP/De Tijd (The Netherlands)“Elizabeth, the wife of the seafaring explorer James Cook, had six children, and each one of them died. Three of the five boys succumbed to illness; the other two were lost at sea; and Elly, the only girl, was run over by a coach. Anna Enquist uses the difficult life of this captain’s wife, who herself would live to ninety-four, as the premise for her novel The Homecoming. It is a heart-wrenching novel, written with much empathy and psychological ingenuity. Enquist has taken the known biographical facts and made a new story from them using her own vision and denouement. Elizabeth spends most of her long life waiting. Waiting for her husband, who will not return from his third and final journey. Waiting for her sons, too, who will meet with just as disastrous an end while following in his footsteps. Enquist paints a penetrating picture of the inner life of her heroine, who must cope with one blow on top of another and still not throw in the towel. As an eighteenth-century wife, Elizabeth had little input into the decisions of her husband, the Admiralty, and the king of England—this much is as clear as day in the novel. Although there are plenty of opportunities for melodrama, The Homecoming steers away from this. There is room for heavy feelings: angst, hope, loss, and anger at all the premature deaths. Apart from describing emotional pain, Enquist also writes about scurvy and exotic cultures and lives. The revelations about the way in which Cook met his end on the Polynesian island of Tahiti are gruesome.” —OPZIJ (The Netherlands)