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|
The
2004 Award
|
|
A
Bed in Heaven by
Tessa de Loo |
Nominated by:
Publisher
of Nominated Edition: |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
|
ABOUT
THE BOOK
|
| 'Yesterday
I buried my father. Now I'm in the Astoria Hotel at Kossuth Lajos utca number
19-21. I am lying in bed with his son' How has Kata, a middle-aged married woman from Amsterdam, arrived at this extraordinary situation with Stefan? Like the layers of an onion skin, secret events of her family's past are revealed, one by one: Kata's student days in Holland and her first love, her father Jeno's career as a cellist, his childhood in Budapest with Uncle Miksa, their peasant mother and prosperous middle-class father, then war, the terrible fate of Hungarian Jews, Jeno's escape to Amsterdam, the Dutch woman - Stefan's mother - who hid him there. And, at the very heart, a shameful, cruel enigma. Just as war throws the entire lives of a generation into disarray, along with the lives of generations to follow, so do the painful effects of love reverberate from grandparents to parents to children, shaping and reshaping their lives as they attempt to lay their own interpretations on the past. As in The Twins, Tessa de Loo has, with great sensitivity and simplicity, succeeded in humanizing history through the stories of a family in peace and war. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Tessa de Loo was born in Bussum, a small town not far from Amsterdam in The Netherlands. She made her début with The Girls from the Sweet Factory. Her prize-winning novels include Meander, Isabelle, The Smoke Sacrifice and The Miracle of the Dog and The Twins. This novel grew out of her maternal grandmother's experiences during the war, when she hid ten Jews and two conscientious objectors in her house - in addition to her eight children. All survived the war - and one of the conscientious objectors would become Tessa de Loo's father. Tessa de Loo now lives in a village in Portugal, where 'life is as it was in fifties Holland and sometimes even as it was in the Middle Ages'. |
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