The Dutch Maiden
A prize-winning historical romance with powerful currents of sexuality, a rambling old house, a young girl, and the brooding man teaching her to fence.
Germany, 1936. Nazism is taking hold. Janna, a young Dutch girl, has been sent to the embittered aristocrat Egon von Bötticher to train as a fencer. Bötticher is as eccentric as his training methods, yet the pupil soon finds herself falling for her master — a man tormented by a wartime past in which Janna's father is implicated.
MARENTE DE MOOR worked as a correspondent in Saint Petersburg for a number of years and wrote a book based on her experiences, Peterburgse Vertellingen (‘Petersburg Stories’), which was published in 1999. She made a successful debut as a novelist in 2007 with De Overtreder ("The Transgressor). For her second novel, The Dutch Maiden, she was awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize along with the European Union Prize for Literature. The novel has so far sold over 70,000 copies in the Netherlands and has been translated into ten languages.
DAVID DOHERTY studied English and literary linguistics in the UK before moving to Amsterdam, where he has been translating all manner of Dutch texts since 1996. He was commended by the jury of the 2017 Vondel Translation Prize for Marente de Moor’s The Dutch Maiden and Jaap Robben’s You Have Me to Love, and was runner-up in 2019 for his translation of Monte Carlo by Peter Terrin. Jaap Robben’s Summer Brother, which Doherty most recently translated, was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.
