The Melting
by Lize Spit
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Pub Date 13 May 2021 | Archive Date 13 May 2021
Pan Macmillan | Picador
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Description
Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. This phenomenal Flemish international bestseller tells of a young woman’s return to the small town where she suffered as a child and the payback she demands there.
Translated by Kristen Gehrman.
Eva can trace the route to Pim’s farm with her eyes closed, even though she has not been to Bovenmeer for many years. There she grew up among the rape fields and dairy farms. There lies also the root of all their grief.
Eva was one of three children born in her small Flemish town in 1988. Growing up alongside the boys Laurens and Pim, Eva sought refuge from her loveless family life in the company of her two friends. But with adolescence came a growing awareness of their burgeoning sexuality. Driven by their newly found desires, the children begin a game that will have serious and violent consequences for them all. Thirteen years after the summer she’s tried for so long to forget, Eva is returning to her village. Everything fell apart that summer, but this time she’ll be prepared. She has a large block of ice in her car boot and she’s ready to settle the score . . .
Part thriller, part coming-of-age novel, The Melting is an extraordinary and unsettling debut from Lize Spit, a reckoning with adolescent cruelty and the scars it leaves.
A Note From the Publisher
*A note on the content: please be aware that this novel contains scenes of sexual and physical violence*
Advance Praise
‘The polar opposite of an Elena Ferrante, the young Flemish novelist delivers an incredibly cruel fable about friendship and adolescence… Lize Spit raises the tension and accelerates the suspense until reaching a dark and majestic ending… Reading The Melting is challenging and disturbing, while each scene is written with precise realism... Spit knows no fear. It is we, the readers, that are left trembling.’ - Leïla Slimani for Le Monde
‘Lize Spit grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck... The novel itself doesn't melt, it crackles. Spit’s is the kind of debut every writer wishes for: familiar, surprising, imaginative and merciless. The Melting is like a long-range missile that at first only casts a dark shadow as it flies overhead, apparently without causing any damage, but then strikes its target with calculated precision.’ De Standaard (Belgium)
‘The Melting – more than a detective story, more than a noir, more than a Bildungsroman – is as successful a novel as you could ever read. A best-selling novelist is born!’ La Repubblica (Italy)
‘We shouldn’t be numbed, we need books like Lize Spit’s, books that lead us down into the realm of evil. We need fiction to realize what is beyond our imaginations. To experience the pain of others. So we can see, and feel – so we can reach out a hand.’ Der Spiegel (Germany)
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781509838684 |
| PRICE | £14.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 416 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Anne M, Reviewer
Eva is driving back to her childhood village with a large block of ice in her car boot.
We learn about Eva’s childhood with her two close friends: Pim, a farmer’s son and Laurens, the butcher’s son, their weird, often cruel and violent “games”, their spats, their anxieties.
A seemingly contented outdoorsy childhood, but with a dark looming presence - the death of Pim’s brother Jan.
Eva’s permanent feeling of gaucheness is superbly captured: “All of a sudden, I saw the world I grew up in from a different perspective. I didn’t fit in like I did before. I was a Duplo man in a Lego house.”
The book reminded me of a curious mix of Lindgren’s “Bullerby Children” and Rijneveld’s “The Discomfort of Evening”. The “three musketeers” sharing everything: the pranks, the dares, the sexual awakening. And yet there always is this tension, this fear, this apprehension.
All three children are caught in a weird, perverse behavioural web with no escape.
A disturbing, dark, upsetting read - you want to stop, but you cannot.
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