Subscribe to our newsletter
Anjet Daanje, the pseudonym of Anjet den Boer, was born in 1965 and writes novels, short stories, and screenplays. The Remembered Soldier won the prestigious 2020 Ferdinand Bordewijk Prize, the Best Book of Groningen Prize, and was longlisted for the 2020 Libris Literature Prize. More about this author >
David McKay is an award-winning translator of Dutch fiction and nonfiction. Born and educated in the United States, he has lived in and around The Hague since 1997. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination. Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion.
The Remembered Soldier is a dazzling exploration of love, longing, and memory in the aftermath of World War I. Anjet Daanje’s rendering of a couple’s interiority as they struggle to claw their deepest desires back from the devastation of war is by turns moving and unsettling, and David McKay’s virtuosic translation draws English readers into the hypnotic unfolding of a narrative that is at once a careful probing of the human mind and a lyrical triumph.
Joseph O'Neill for Anjet Daanje & David McKay at the 2025 National Book Awards Finalist Reading
