Afterlight

＂With its tight sentences and a fast pace, Afterlight moves like detective fiction. It’s a poignant novel in which a single pregnant woman is mistreated in her conservative society; she remains resilient and determined to honor her baby’s memory.＂ -Foreword Reviews

The young free-spirited florist Frieda grew up in a strictly Catholic environment in the 1960s. When she steps onto a frozen river on a late winter afternoon, little does she know that everything is about to change for her. On the ice she meets the married Otto. They experience a love that begins stormy and ends fatefully: Frieda becomes pregnant - a scandal in the world in which she moves. And so she must never be the mother of her secret child. For decades she kept her memories of this episode in her life to herself. But the grief for the lost child remains, despite the later marriage, despite the son she still has.
At the age of eighty-one, Frieda is suddenly alone again. The silent sorrow returns with force. Only then does she dare to face her story - and to share it.
With Afterlight, inspired by true events, Robben not only pulls back the veil on Frieda’s story, but also shines a light on the experiences of countless women between the 1950s and 1980s. The result is an impressive story about buried female trauma, caused by society, organized religion and the dominant social mores.

JAAP ROBBEN is a Dutch poet, playwright, performer, and acclaimed children’s author. You Have Me to Love, his first novel for adults, won the 2014 Dutch Booksellers Award, the Dioraphte Prize, and the ANV Award for best Dutch debut. Robben was chosen as one of the featured debut authors at the 2018 Brooklyn Book Festival. Summer Brother, his second novel, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2021. Afterlight is his third novel published by World Editions.

DAVID DOHERTY studied English and literary linguistics in the UK before moving to Amsterdam, where he has been translating all manner of Dutch texts since 1996. He was commended by the jury of the 2017 Vondel Translation Prize for Marente de Moor’s The Dutch Maiden and Jaap Robben’s You Have Me to Love, and was runner-up in 2019 for his translation of Monte Carlo by Peter Terrin. Jaap Robben’s Summer Brother, which Doherty most recently translated, was longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize.