The charm of Bakker’s book is how finely every element is balanced, how perfectly the story is paced. . . . Bakker shows a fine gift for laconic comedy. . . . The great pleasure of this novel is how it has just enough plot to allow us to relish its beautifully turned observations of birds and beasts, weather and water.

A novel of restrained tenderness and laconic humor.

Bakker captures the feel of life in the Dutch countryside in a style which is both dazzling and subdued....a poignant story, recounted in a tone at once spare and loving.

This is a novel of great brilliance and subtlety. It contains scenes of enveloping psychological force but is open-ended, its extraordinary last section suggesting that fulfilment of long-standing aspirations can arrive, unanticipated, in late middle-age. Human dramas are offset by landscape and animals feelingly delineated, and David Colmer's translation is distinguished by an exceptional (and crucial) ear for dialogue.

This is a quiet book, humble in tone, with a fine, self-deprecating humour […] It leaves the reader touched and with the impression of having seen and smelled the ever-damp Dutch platteland.

There's a magic about this book which is difficult to capture.

Bakker’s paean to the Dutch countryside is beautifully understated, as is his portrayal of the characters.

Gerbrand Bakker’s outstanding debut novel, set in the Dutch countryside, is one of those rare works of fiction that everyone should read. It is full of life and truth, all conveyed through a narrative voice that refuses to allow the reader to turn away for a moment.

There is a yearning quality about the restrained, perambulating but elegant prose of The Twin . . .

Turning the last page leaves one achingly deprived, longing for more.

Gerbrand Bakker’s writing is fabulously clear, so clear that each sentence leaves a rippling wake.

It never hits a false note.

Against the odds, against your own expectations, it all works.

In The Twin, Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker has accomplished the difficult task of rendering the static solitude of his protagonist into something dynamic and readable. In a prose style unhurried but visceral (translated without a false note by David Colmer), he creates and explores a loneliness that any reader would recognize as his own.

Penetrating, beautifully sparse, and eerie in its stillness . . .

It is refreshing to find a book at once so engaging and intelligent, and in which stylistic simplicity is used with grace and effectiveness.

Dutch may be considered a “minor” language, but Bakker’s is a major work, restrained and beautiful.

Bakker’s style is lucid and spare. . . . The landscape, the weather — which is everywhere — are all succinctly captured . . .