The Blessed Rita

He had seen more and more people from the East in recent years. Mostly gypsies, people said. Bulgarians, Romanians - you could tell by the plates on the vans and the trailers. The Poles had been around for some time already. Burglaries, thefts. The blessings of the new Europe.

He had seen more and more people from the East in recent years. Mostly gypsies, people said. Bulgarians, Romanians - you could tell by the plates on the vans and the trailers. The Poles had been around for some time already. Burglaries, thefts. The blessings of the new Europe.

Paul Krzen lives with his father in an old farmhouse, not far from the German border. Where once his father took care of him, now he takes care of his father. It has been a long time since his beautiful, worldly-wise mother left them for the arms of a Russian pilot, never once looking back.

Paul's world is changing - his small Dutch village is now home to Chinese restaurateurs, Polish plumbers, and Russian thugs. Saint Rita, the patron saint of lost causes, watches over Paul and his best friend Hedwiges, two misfits at odds with the modern world, while Paul takes comfort in his own Blessed Rita, a prostitute from Quezon. But even she cannot protect them from the tragedy that is about to unfold.

In this sharply observed, darkly funny novel, Wieringa shines a light on people struggling at the margins of a changing world. The Blessed Rita is an affecting tribute to those left behind and an ode to those wanting to transcend themselves and their heritage.

Critical, dark, and profound fiction.
- Le Monde

An elegiac and beautifully written portrayal of a Dutch border village at the coalface of a New Europe, and a haunting tale of a man struggling to find purpose in a rapidly changing world, walking a tightrope between goodness and unresolved rage.
- Arnold Zable

The Blessed Rita is 'the patroness of hopeless causes, of barren women and women who were unhappily married, as well as butchers and meat traders'. Tommy Wieringa tells an engrossing, sometimes funny, and, at its end frightening, story of the mixed fortunes, virtues, and vices of many of the kinds of people who need her succour. He depicts their lives through changing times, cultures, and political circumstances with insight, humane wisdom, and an eye for detail and ear for tone that is given only to someone whose heart is as lucid as his mind is sharp. He does it in prose that is always simple, yet which becomes poetry so unexpectedly that it takes one's breath away.
- Raimond Gaita

Praise for Tommy Wieringa -
The best contemporary novels are a quest made out of literary and moral ambition. Those who have successfully pursued this Holy Grail in recent times are Bolano with his The Savage Detectives, Sebald in Austerlitz, Coetzee with Disgrace and the late Philip Roth. From now on, to that august list must be added the name of Tommy Wieringa.
- Le Figaro