One of the greatest modern novelists
- A. S. Byatt,
The prose has such clarity, charm and lightness that you take to disorientation with pleasure
- Michael Ignatieff, Sunday Times
After years of distinction in his own country, Cees Nooteboom has commanded attention with this gentle, European Literature Prize-winning story
Independent
He is a thinker as much as a storyteller and brings astute insight to his evocation of character and imaginative intellectualism... Playful, deadly serious and achingly real... Nooteboom makes every word, every observation, not only count but also linger
Irish Times
Nooteboom writes beautifully. His prose is clean and precise without feeling sparse, and he manages to combine clarity with an intense lyricism… Part travelogue, part elegy, part love story, this is an exquisite little novel, and far more substantial than its 90 pages suggest
Guardian
Sharp, elegant prose... It recalls, in tone, Vladimir Nabokov. The language is, by turns, delicately allusive and rich, even ripely comic
- D. J. Enright, Times Literary Supplement
He writes a speculative, playful, diversionary fiction that is never necessarily set where it says it is set
Glasgow Herald
Nooteboom's traceries of love, identity, knowledge, death and transfiguration have seldom seemed more evocative
Boston Globe
Nooteboom has shown himself a master of ironic wisdom, but also of elated, elegiac feeling. Intricately composed and finely translated, The Following Story will still be delivering after many readings
- Ben Rogers, Independent on Sunday
It has a compelling energy and rare elegance to equal its extraordinary ambitions... <i>The Following Story</i> is several times more valuable than the usual fare, and a book that earns more than one reading
New Statesman
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL
One morning Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, where twenty years previously he slept with another man’s wife. Yet he is quite certain that the night before he went to sleep as normal in his house in Amsterdam. And so Herman begins a physical journey and a metaphysical adventure, which will re-route him via past loves, through the pangs and pleasures of memory, and to the very heart of that crucial question: ‘who am I?’.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL
One morning Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, where twenty years previously he slept with another man’s wife.