The Remembered Soldier - Anjet Daanje , David McKay (Translator)

Written by Anjet Daanje, David McKay (Translator)
Read by Jonathan Todd Ross
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

LONGLISTED for the 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for TRANSLATED LITERATURE

“An epic, extraordinary story of love, identity and war, Anjet Daanje’s first novel in English is a powerfully vivid portrait of two people dealing with their changed lives after the first world war . . . David McKay’s page-turning translation faithfully conveys the propulsive nature of Daanje’s long, sinuous sentences . . . Virtuoso stuff.”—The Financial Times

“Daanje … is currently the Netherlands’ most celebrated writer. Her achievement is to bring us so close to her characters, and for so long an exposure, that they seem emotionally naked, utterly human in their efforts and deceptions. In its dangerous admixture of truth and reassembled reality, The Remembered Soldier develops an unforgettable picture of marital love.”—The Wall Street Journal

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 listener is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.

Length: 24 hrs and 34 mins
Release date: 09-16-25