Tonio

What you can't talk about, you have to write a novel about, that's A.F.'s life and survival maxim. Th. van der Heijdens. It is the only way he can meet the fate of his 22-year-old son. Tonio van der Heijden died on 23 May 2010 in Amsterdam: a car ran over him early in the morning on his way home. In a two-part novel, first-person narrator Adri finds and invents the first six years of his son's life, from his birth in June 1988 until he starts school. This part of the novel obeys the motto: hold on to the son, protect him from all dangers. The second part, in the form of a detective novel, constructs Tonio's death circumstances, which in themselves are completely illogical. The result is a touching and moving novel about misfortune par excellence, about the incomprehensibility of the unimaginable.