Miniaturist

There’s a peculiar austerity to Jessie Burton’s writing. It’s interesting that she should have started her career – with the million-selling The Miniaturist (2014) – in Amsterdam during the last years of the Dutch golden age, when the wealth of the Calvinist Netherlands was matched only by its thrift and industriousness. That atmosphere of severity and opulence seems to have fed through to Burton’s prose at a formal level. Her writing is both removed and dignified, although this coldness is counteracted by an almost…

When we rejoin Nella Oortman, the heroine of Jessie Burton’s blockbuster 2014 debut The Miniaturist, we find her almost as we left her. She still lives in her dead husband Johannes Brandt’s home on the Herengracht canal in Amsterdam, along with Cornelia the cook, Johannes’s once-enslaved manservant Otto, and Thea, the child Otto fathered with Johannes’s steely sister, Marin. So far so familiar, but 18 years have passed: Nella is now 37 and baby Thea a young woman. The three unrelated adults have bonded into a family after…