The Remembered Soldier

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day, a woman named Julienne appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn't turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand's biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne's stories about him. But how can he be certain that she's telling the truth?

In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne's word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve.

'An epic, extraordinary story of love, identity and war Anjet Daanje's first novel in English is a powerfully vivid portrait of two people dealing with their changed lives after the First World War ... David McKay's page-turning translation faithfully conveys the propulsive nature of Daanje's long, sinuous sentences ... A novel of epic scope that resonates powerfully while wars of tragic loss continue to be fought on multiple fronts, including in Europe. Daanje exhibits brilliant powers of reconstitution in her descriptions of the war's aftermath and the blighted landscapes that it left behind.'
—Tobias Grey, The Financial Times

'Ms. Daanje has a dense, rhythmic writing style that captures how the consciousness of each character flows ... In David McKay's assiduous translation from the Dutch, the sentences tumble forward hypnotically, if often monotonously, from one moment to the next. It's a prose style that, like Amand, seems to have no past, only a perpetually unspooling present ... In its dangerous admixture of truth and lies and reassembled reality, The Remembered Soldier develops an unforgettable picture of marital love.'
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

'The phenomenal English-language debut from Daanje weaves an affecting love story through a tangle of memories and dreams ... The complex and layered narrative is as moving as it is unsettling, and it will keep readers wondering about the truth long after the final page. It's a remarkable achievement.'
—Publishers Weekly, starred review