Without Mercy - Softcover

Frank and Phinus have been happily married for fourteen years when a senseless act loses them their only child, their teenage son Jem. From then on they are immersed in a nightmare from which there seems to be no escape. Phinus loses her ability to sleep, and the formerly gentle Frank tries to combat his grief and guilt with obsessive vengefulness which escalates out of control. A weekend visit to a country house hotel is supposed to bring the couple back together, but it erups into a series of escalating bizarre, hilarious confrontations which only emphasizes their estrangement. Dorrestein's novels are always based on a topical social issue familiar from newspaper headlines, which make them provocative and contemporary: In Without Mercy, it is a teenage shooting with echoes of American high school massacres like that at Columbine High in Denver two years ago. This heartbreaking, yet strangely funny, thought-provoking and compelling novel about guilt and grief is by a mistress of suspense who shows us all that hell is not other people as is generally supposed: that there is nothing as terrible as what a person can do to himself.

Renate Dorrestein is one of Holland's best-loved novelists. Born in Amsterdam in 1954, she became a journalist before writing her first novel, Outsiders, which was published in 1983. Her books have regularly appeared at the top of the Dutch bestsellers lists ever since. She has been nominated for the Libris Prize and won an Annie Romein Prize in 1993 for her 'original and irresistible' body of work. In 1997 she was voted runner-up for the Publieksprijs for the most popular Dutch writer. A Heart Of Stone is her first novel to be translated into English.