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Book Title

My Heavenly Favorite

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Lucas Rijneveld; Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison
Body
A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, My Heavenly Favorite is the remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld’s international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his “Favorite”—the farmer’s daughter. She hovers on the precipice of adolescence, and longs to have a boy’s body. The veterinarian seems to be a tantalizing possible path out from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.

Narrated after the veterinarian has been punished for his crimes, Rijneveld’s audacious, profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Rijneveld refracts the contours of the Lolita story with a kind of perverse glee, taking the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces. An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favorite “confirms Rijneveld’s singular, deeply discomforting talent” (Financial Times UK).

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List Price
$28.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-273-8
Format
Format
Hardcover
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
344
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
“A tour de force of transgressive imagination” (The Guardian UK) by the winner of the International Booker Prize

About the Author

Lucas  Rijneveld
Credit: Jeroen Jumelet
Lucas Rijneveld grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. He is the author of The Discomfort of Evening, which was the first Dutch book to win the International Booker Prize, as well as three poetry collections.
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Michele Hutchison is a British writer and translator, mainly of Dutch-language literature. She won the 2020 International Booker Prize for her translation of The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. She was also awarded the Vondel Translation Prize for her translation of Stage Four by Sander Kollaard.
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Praise

  • “Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favorite is a novel of exquisite discomfort and delicious poetry. Rijneveld writes with peerless moral courage and a sheer delight in the abject that we must each face in ourselves. This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp. I’m in awe.”—Brandon Taylor
  • “You feel borne along by the flow of language, the language of flow, knowing you’re supposed to feel like this seamless stream, which suddenly you’re drinking, goes down too easy—and ‘you,’ referring most often to the favorite but also to the judging reader, are the narrator’s primary addressee.”—Katie Kadue, Bookforum
  • “Horrifying and brilliant. . . . However sickening My Heavenly Favorite is, it’s certainly an example of literary mastery.”—Francesca Peacock, Los Angeles Review of Books
  • “The style is fevered . . . exploring many of the same themes that drove Rijneveld’s first book: bucolic life, taboos, and abjection, among others.”—Dilara O’Neil, Vulture, “23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2024”
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