My Heavenly Favorite is a harrowing, unforgettable masterpiece by the winner of the Booker International Prize. This work serves as a confession, a lament, and a mad gush of grief and obsession. It is the remarkable and chilling successor to Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening.

The narrative tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his "Favorite"—the farmer's daughter. She is on the cusp of adolescence and longs to inhabit a boy's body. The veterinarian appears as a tantalizing possible escape from the constrictions of her conservative rural life.

Narrated after the veterinarian has faced punishment for his crimes, Rijneveld's audacious and profane novel captivates with paradoxical beauty in its prose, gripping the reader's attention. The novel refracts the contours of the Lolita story with perverse glee, leading the reader into otherwise unimaginable spaces—pop lyrics, horror novels, the Favorite's fantasized conversations with Freud and Hitler, and her dreams of flight, destruction, and transcendence.

An unflinching depiction of abjection and a pointed excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favorite solidifies Rijneveld as one of the most daring and brilliant writers on the world stage.