A gripping Psychological thriller about parenthood and loss, bullying and revenge!
Kito is the only child of his adoptive parents. Chubby and dark-skinned, he is ruthlessly bullied at school, but at home he says nothing of what he is going through, only that he has pains in his stomach. After a class outing to the beach, Kito goes missing. Days later his lifeless body is discovered washed up on the sand.
Determined to find the person responsible for Kito’s death, his mother follows the trail to drama teacher Hannah, who was in charge of overseeing the field trip that day. By this time Hannah has begun a new life in the Bulgarian countryside, and unsuspectingly welcomes Kito’s mother. As the snow begins to fall the two women become entangled in a claustrophobic relationship, trust between them grows and Hannah hesitantly begins to tell the story of Kito. But Kito’s mother has only one thing on her mind, revenge…
Translated from Dutch by Sarah Welling
Sarah Welling grew up in Eindhoven, in a bilingual family of teachers and translators. She has degrees in English Literature and Spanish and Latin American Studies from the Universities of Amsterdam and London . She works as a web editor and literary translator including. translator of exhibition texts for museums in Amsterdam , where she lives. She has also worked as a bookseller, language trainer and an editor. She has had work published in the English-language edition of a Dutch literary magazine, Das Mag, and is currently working on translations of a novel and an essay for another literary magazine.
Wytske Versteeg is a Dutch author and political scientist. In 2008 Versteeg published This is Not a Homeless Person (Dit is geen dakloze) about her experiences as a volunteer, mixing philosophical literature with journalistic observations of homelessness. Her debut novel De wezenlozen (Weightless) was nominated for the Opzij Literature Prize 2013 and long-listed for the AKO Literature Prize. The Boy is Versteeg's second novel and won the BNG Bank Literature Prize (BNG Nieuwe Literatuurprijs) in 2014 and was longlisted for the prestigious Libris Literature Prize. It has also been translated into German, Italian, Turkish and Danish.
