Gerbrand Bakker - Böcker

When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother's role and spending the rest of his days 'with his head under a cow'. After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. 'A double bed and a duvet', advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm? The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one's own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing.

By the award-winning author of The TwinOn a hot summer’s day in June 1969 everyone in the village gathered to welcome Queen Juliana. It would have been an unforgettable day of celebration if only the baker hadn’t been running late with his deliveries and knocked down little Hanne with his brand-new VW van.Years later, Jan arrives on a hot day in June in order to tidy his sister’s grave, and is overcome again with grief and silent fury. Isn’t it finally time to get to the bottom of things? June traces in spellbinding, tender detail how the ripples from one tragic incident spread through a community, a family and down the generations.‘Illuminating’ Independent‘Exceptional’ Irish Times

Multi–award winning Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker’s phenomenal new novel about grief and the unavoidable power of family ties.Simon never knew his father, Cornelis. When his wife told him she was pregnant, Cornelis packed his bags, and a day later he was dead. Or everyone assumed he was dead; after all, he was on the passenger list of the KLM plane that crashed in Tenerife in 1977.Simon is a hairdresser, just like his father and grandfather before him, but he is not passionate about cutting and shaving. ‘Closed’ appears on his shop’s front door more often than ‘open’, because every customer is a person, and people suck the energy from him. But there is one client he regularly interacts with: the writer. The writer is looking for a subject for his next book, and becomes captivated by the story of Simon’s father.As Simon probes the mystery of what happened to his father, a deeply humane and beautifully observed portrait of loneliness emerges in another captivating novel from one of Europe’s greatest storytellers.