The Following Story

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

He writes a speculative, playful, diversionary fiction that is never necessarily set where it says it is set

Glasgow Herald

One of the greatest modern novelists

A. S. Byatt

Nooteboom's traceries of love, identity, knowledge, death and transfiguration have seldom seemed more evocative

Boston Globe

The prose has such clarity, charm and lightness that you take to disorientation with pleasure

Michael Ignatieff, Sunday Times

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

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... The Following Story is several times more valuable than the usual fare, and a book that earns more than one reading

New Statesman