My Heavenly Favourite

SENSATIONAL WINNERS OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 'It's been a long time since a novel has destroyed me like this . . . Electrifying . . . One of the boldest writers alive today.' Max Porter 'A novel of exquisite discomfort and delicious poetry . . . Made me laugh and gasp . . . I'm in awe.' Brandon Taylor 'Rejuvenating, glorious, brilliant. A book about obsession with prose that obsessed me from the first line.' Daisy Johnson In the tempestuous summer of 2005, a local veterinarian becomes enraptured by a 14-year-old farmer's daughter - his 'favourite' - as he tends her father's cows. This deeply troubled soul is our narrator: a man who believes he offers the object of his love a tantalizing path out of the constrictions of her conservative rural life, a chance to escape to a world of fantasy. But the obsessive reliance he cultivates builds into a terrifying trap, with a crime and confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small community apart. An unflinching excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favourite is a torrent of grief and obsession. The remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld's international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening, this profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page. Translated by Michele Hutchison This novel is about an adult who is sexually attracted to a minor and contains sexual violence.

Lucas Rijneveld (b. 1991) grew up in a Reformed farming family in North Brabant before moving to Utrecht. One of the greatest new voices in Dutch literature, his first poetry collection, Calf's Caul,was awarded the C. Buddingh' Prize for best poetry debut in 2015, with the newspaper de Volkskrant naming them literary talent of the year. In 2018, Atlas Contact published his first novel, The Discomfort of Evening,which won the prestigious ANV Debut Prize and was a national bestseller. The UK edition won the Booker International Prize 2020. Alongside his writing career, Rijneveld works on a dairy farm.