Read our sample translation of The Hunting Lodge
About the book
After his mother Elsie’s death, eighteen-year-old Maxwell travels to Suriname, the paradise where he spent the first years of his childhood. As soon as he arrives at the river Marowijne on the national border with French Guyana, he recalls the dramatic crossing he made with his parents a few years before. When the family returns to the Netherlands at the end of the 1960s, they move into a dark hunting lodge on royal grounds. The estate manager’s adult son has an unhealthy fixation with Maxwell, who by then begins to suspect that he is the son of the prince and not his father Jim. When Maxwell is twelve years old, Jim finds himself transferred to Suriname again. The prince, enmeshed in the Lockheed Affair, craves Elsie’s attention. When he visits the lodge the harmony seems restored, but each time he leaves Maxwell feels guilty towards Jim for being a secret child. Maxwell’s salvation arrives in the form of the new neighbours, a childless couple with a collection of contemporary art, who welcome him as their own son.