The Evenings: A Winter's Tale [Paperback]

THE FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF A POSTWAR MASTERPIECE

'I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.'

Twenty-three-year-old Frits - office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes - finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.

This is the story of ten evenings in Frits's life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city street and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him.

Darkly funny and mesmerising, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty.IPPY Literary Fiction Award Bronze Medalist
AnObserver,Financial Times, andIrish TimesBook of the Year

Exceptional... a crisp and readable translation by Sam Garrett. — The Wall Street Journal

Fascinating, hilarious, and page-turning. The publication of this novel marks the exciting introduction of a wonderful writer to an Anglophone audience.  — Publishers Weekly

Reviewers have compared it favorably to J .D. Salinger’sThe Catcher in the Rye, Albert Camus’sThe Stranger and Karl Ove Knausgaard’sMy Struggle. InThe Irish Times, Eileen Battersby called it 'one of the finest studies of youthful malaise ever written,' and inThe Guardian, Tim Parks described it as 'not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manqué of modern European literature.'  The Society of Dutch Literature ranked it as the country’s best 20th-century novel and its third-best of all time. —The New York Times

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