I read this because it was short listed for the 2024 Booker Prize, and if it weren't for how spectacular a book James is, this would be my choice to win.
The book is set in post-WWII Netherlands and it deals with the reckoning with what happened. Isabel is the main character, and she is emotionally complicated and very buttoned down and inhibited--she is a figure seething with resentments and desires that she keeps, rigidly and violently, in check. She lives in the house in which she grew up and in which her mother died, in a small town 15 years after the end of the war, obsessively cleaning and polishing the tableware and other objects that her mother loved while ruling tyrannically over the meek local girl who is her maid. When her socially confident and womanizing brother – who has been promised the house as his inheritance, making Isabel’s residence there tenuous and time-limited – leaves the country for several weeks, he brings his new girlfriend, the vivacious and flamboyant Eva, to live with Isabel, threatening to loosen or to sever the tight coils into which she has wound her existence. Both Isabel and I did not see what was coming from Eva, and it is a really enjoyable twist in the plot that comes to a satisfying conclusion.
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