Ventoux
A moving and hilarious feel-good novel about male friendship, romance, intrigue, treachery and cycling.
During the summer of 1982, a group of friends — five boys and one girl — travel to French Provence, three of whom climb the legendary Mont Ventoux on their bicycles. A tragic accident claims the life of one of them, the promising young poet, Peter. Thirty years later, the old friends return to conquer the mountain and the demons of their past.
Ventoux is both a hilarious and insightful portrait of a generation and a stunningly accurate depiction of male friendship. It's a glorious tragicomedy for everyone who loves to read a well-crafted feel-good novel and especially recommended for cycling aficionados who will recognise Mont Ventoux as the scene of many classic races.
'Wagendorp's book manages to be funny, shrewd, and moving, with a complex structure that never feels cumbersome, and a finale so intense that you want to read it very slowly, almost one word at a time.' — The Guardian
'A wonderful blend of humor, suspense, and poignancy, which will appeal to non-cyclists as well as those of us who understand what it takes to scale a mountain as evocative, daunting, and symbolic as Mont Ventoux."' — Felix Lowe, author of Climbs & Punishment
BERT WAGENDORP (1956) is a writer and columnist for the Dutch national newspaper De Volkskrant. His novel Ventoux was proclaimed Book of the Month by the leading Dutch television talkshow DWDD and received unanimous rave reviews from the press, selling 100,000 copies within the first six months. The book has been adapted into a Dutch-language film of the same name.
PAUL VINCENT is a Dutch-to-English translator based in London. He studied at Cambridge and in Amsterdam, and after teaching Dutch at the University of London for over twenty years became a full-time translator in 1989. Since then he has published a wide variety of translated poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, including work by Achterberg, Claus, Couperus, Elsschot, Jellema, Mulisch, De Moor, and Van den Brink. He is a member of the Society of Dutch Literature in Leiden, and has won the Reid Prize for poetry translation, the Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation, and (jointly) the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize.
