She soon realises that all is not as it seems in the Brandt household. Unsurprisingly as a very young woman new to bourgeois society and city life, Nella finds it a challenge to adjust. Also present under his roof are his forbidding unmarried sister Marin and two servants: Cordelia, who grew up in the local orphanage, and Otto, a black manservant and former slave. The Miniaturist is narrated in the third person, present tense in the perspective of eighteen-year-old Nella, an unsophisticated country girl who has recently been strategically married off to wealthy Amsterdam merchant Johannes Brandt, a man twice her age. It’s a sizeable novel and the fact that it only took me three days to finish is telling. This ceased to matter the moment I began reading. The Miniaturist is set in seventeenth-century Amsterdam (prompting inevitable comparisons with Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring) and I am not generally a fan of historical fiction set in the distant past. The proof sat on my bookshelf for a good couple of months before curiosity got the better of me. This kind of phenomenal success and the media attention which goes with it is very rare for a debut author and brings a lot of pressure to deliver. It was acquired by Picador in the UK for a six figure sum and went to auction in more than thirty countries. That is true of The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, a debut which is now being released or eagerly anticipated all over the world. I am writing fewer reviews these days so only pick the books which really stand out for me.
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