“an assured and mature new voice ... in European fiction”
The Guardian
With just two novels (IMPAC-winning The Twin and The Detour, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), Dutch novelist Gerbrand Bakker has established himself as one of the leading figures in contemporary European fiction. His work – spare, unsentimental and rooted in sensory descriptions of place – often maps the territory of grief, and his new novel, June, is no exception. When Anna Kaan, grandmother of the Kaan clan, retreats into the family hayloft with a bottle of Advocaat and stubbornly refuses to come down, her protest gradually exposes the impact of one terrible day, forty years before, on three generations of lives. Bakker discusses June with journalist and broadcaster Mick Heaney.