The Book Club

This darkly comic, unsettling novel explores snobbery, ambition and personal morality in the 21st century.

Teresa Pelikaan lives a charmed life in an affluent Dutch village. While it may seem sleepy and idyllic, the village is populated with top-class bankers, lawyers and intellectuals who are playing on the world stage from the comfort of their state-of-the-art home offices.
Teresa's husband and father are two of these high-flyers, and members of the village's very exclusive book club. When Teresa suggests that they read an autobiographical love story set in an asylum written by a girl she used to go to school with, the book club is outraged.
However, beneath their outward show of intellectual snobbery lies a more sinister explanation for this reluctance. Teresa discovers that the book club members were to some extent complicit in the actions of the author's father, which led to the death of 80 children in Haiti.

As the horrors of the past are uncovered, Februari raises many troubling questions: If you follow all the rules, are you absolved of guilt? At what point does knowledge make you implicit in an act of injustice? And what happens to personal responsibility in an age when decisions affecting the lives of thousands can be made at the click of a mouse?