Overview

After a two-decade silence, Astrid Roemer returns with a luminous exploration of memory, identity, and the reverberations of colonialism In 1966 Suriname, as the shadow of colonial rule lingers, Grandma Bee lies dying. The matriarch of a sprawling, mixed-heritage family - Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, Jewish - she commands with a sharp tongue and a smouldering cigar. But as her body falters, so too does the reckoning: with loss, memory, and the bonds that remain when bloodlines scatter. As illness takes hold, her thoughts return to Heli, a beloved granddaughter exiled to the Netherlands after an affair with her white teacher. She reflects on her descendants - strangers to one another, scattered across continents. What binds them together? What endures when history has fragmented the idea of kin?

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9781917126090

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In 1966, at the age of nineteen, Astrid Roemer emigrated from Suriname to the Netherlands. She identifies herself as a cosmopolitan writer. Exploring themes of race, gender, family and identity, her poetic, unconventional prose stands in the tradition of authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. She was awarded the P.C. Hooft Prize in 2016, and the three-yearly Dutch Literature Prize (Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren) in 2021. Lucy Scott is a translator of Caribbean literature written in Dutch and French. Her short story and essay translations thus far have appeared in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee Review and in Wilderness House Literary Review. She is the translator of Astrid Roemer's On a Woman's Madness. David McKay, a literary translator based in The Hague, is best known for translating Stefan Hertmans's novels, including The Ascent. He has been shortlisted for various translation prizes and won the Vondel Prize for Hertmans's War and Turpentine. Other recent publications include Charlotte van den Broeck's Bold Ventures.

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