Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
HELLA S. HAASSE was born in 1918 in Batavia, modern-day Jakarta. She moved to the Netherlands after secondary school. She started publishing in 1945 and many of her books have gained classic status in the Netherlands. Haasse has received several prestigious literary awards, among them the Dutch Literature Prize in 2004, and her work has been translated into many languages. The Tea Lords is the first work of hers translated into English for 15 years. www.hellahaassemuseum.nl INA RILKE translates Dutch, Flemish and French literature. Among the authors she has translated are Hafid Bouazza, Louis Couperus, W.F. Hermans, Erwin Mortier, Cees Nooteboom, Pierre Péju and Dai Sijie. She has won the Vondel Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the Flemish Culture Prize for literary translation.A graceful, marvellously achieved improvisation that only a novelist of the greatest imagination and sympathy could have written
- Julian Evans, Guardian
Put it at the top of your reading list
Stylist
Haasse has created a compelling piece of innovative historical fiction ... [She] effortlessly combines an evocation of the plantation's heady, lush vegetation with her articulation of the growing distance between man and wife. And her aptly chosen metaphors are all skillfully conveyed in Ina Rilke's translation
Sunday Times
Displays a knowledgeable and intimate empathy for plantation life, sucking you into the steaming Indonesian jungles and cut-glass propriety of Dutch colonial society without suspending judgement on colonialism itself
- Claire Allfree, Metro
The large cast of characters is convincingly displayed and deftly manipulated. The evocation of Java is vivid and full of feeling
- Allan Massie, Scotsman
Haasse's atmospheric historical novel receives an elegantly idiomatic translation from Ina Rilke ... an affecting portrait of a life devoted to duty, which asks whether the sacrifice was worth the emotional costs.
- Adrian Turpin, Financial Times
Translated into graceful prose, this morally challenging work, constructed from documents and letters, has already become a novel by which others, inside and outside its tradition, can be judged.
- Paul Binding, Independent