‘One of Bakker’s gifts is an ability to place us in a landscape so utterly that the damp begins to seep through the soles of our shoes, yet the terrain is never romanticised and his descriptions are at once attentive and economical. This is vital for a writer whose work deals so intimately with the physical and mental fabric of grief … The Detour is a beautiful, oddly moving work of fiction, a quiet read that lingers long in the mind, like the ghosts that linger in our homes, and in the land around us.’
John Burnside, The Guardian
‘A novel of restrained tenderness and laconic humour.’
J.M. Coetzee
‘Stealthy, seductive storytelling that draws you into a world of silent rage and quite unexpected relationships. Compelling and convincing from beginning to end.’
Tim Parks
‘Bakker’s spare prose gradually builds a sense of urgency beneath this haunting novel’s deceptively placid surface.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘In stark but lyrical prose, Bakker explores themes of both isolation and intimacy.’
`, Kirkus Reviews
‘[An] affecting mystery … pocketed with meaning and subtly menacing. It moves rapidly along.’
The New Yorker
‘Intense … Evocative and unsettling … Like other recent novels it slightly resembles, such as Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee and Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, The Detour has the laconic texture and angular plotting of a thriller, with shifting points of view that keep the reader guessing about what surprise is lurking around the corner.’
Christopher Benfey, The New York Review of Books
‘Essential reading for fans of literary fiction … Haunting, fearless, and heartbreaking … Brave and beautifully realised.’
Library Journal
‘Hypnotic … Haunting … Heartbreaking … Vividly conjure[s] the misty, mossy landscape [and] illuminates [Emily] Dickinson’s life.’
Booklist
‘Simple and devastating … Written and translated with lapidary precision, perspective, and crisp prose; there is emotion and expression, but held back from the writing, which is controlled and full of clean, physical detail.’
The Independent
‘I loved Gerbrand Bakker’s beautiful novel The Twin, but nothing could have prepared me for the singular experience of reading The Detour. Mr Bakker illuminates the beautiful, tragic darkness at the core of every life with a meticulously honest compassion that is both heartbreaking and revivifying. This book stopped me in my tracks, and moved me beyond words.’
Peter Cameron, author of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
‘The Detour is unlike anything I have read. In language deceptively spare and almost excruciatingly precise, it lays at our feet a host of secrets that will not yield to waking logic. It will stretch and vex and haunt, this novel; it has the queer, ruthless beauty of a dream.’
Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Others
‘The exquisitely clear style of The Detour, in this beautifully natural translation, sustains a tightly controlled and tense story as it gradually reveals itself, ever surprising and suspenseful and impossible to predict from one page to the next. A powerful, unusual, and engrossing novel.’
Lydia Davis, author of Varieties of Disturbance
‘The holy writ in Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker’s novel The Detour is the hauntingly inscrutable poetry of Emily Dickinson … Everything comes at that strange Dickinsonian slant, lighting up the seemingly ordinary natural surroundings with an unearthly aura of menace.’
The Wall Street Journal
‘In The Detour, previous IMPAC winner Gerbrand Bakker delivers a moving, powerful tale about a mysterious woman who decamps from the Netherlands to north Wales … This is a quiet, but strangely dangerous book that creeps up on the reader, just as fate creeps up on its principal character. Once read, The Detour stays in the mind’
Judges' comments from the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
