Welcome back to our bi-monthly reading series, Caoilinn in Conversation, featuring authors that call the UK and Ireland home, curated by the super-talented Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter. On Tuesday, August 15th we helped celebrate Bette Adriaanse's new novel,What's Mine.
About What's Mine:
A self-described "visual" person, Luis has filled his white-carpeted apartment with clean beautiful things: a glass table, a white couch, marble countertops, workout equipment. He can afford to on his meager bagel shop salary thanks to inheriting his mother's city apartment. This is his home--a refuge from a confusing and intimidating world.
Professor William Rose is an Oxford intellectual. He's visiting Amsterdam to learn where he came from with the aid of an old letter which may prove Edward Hond, the renowned Dutch philanthropist, is his biological father. Following the letter's address, he finds himself looking up into the lit windows of a small, one-bedroom apartment... only to see Luis. His choice to knock on the door, and Luis's choice to let him in, will unravel each of their pasts, dismantling their lives as fifty square meters of meticulously decorated space becomes a territorial battleground.
What's Mine is Bette Adriaanse's humorous and heartbreaking tale of two men who refuse to share. Luis and William's conflicting world views, not to mention living habits, will test the limits of their sanity as well as those around them. A nosy neighbor, a philosophical cleaning lady, a maritime space lawyer, and the old park gardener will all begin to seek the answer to one critical question: Can what's mine be yours too?
About the authors:
Bette Adriaanse is a writer and an artist. She was born in Amsterdam in 1984. Bette graduated from the Image & Language department at the Gerrit Rietveld Fine Art Academy in Amsterdam and has received her Master in Creative Writing from Oxford University. Her first novel Rus Like Everyone Else was published by Unnamed Press in 2015. The novel appeared as Post Voor Rus Ordelman in the Netherlands. Her second novel, What’s Mine, will be published by Unnamed Press in August 2023. It will appear as Wat Van Mij Is in the Netherlands, with Uitgeverij Cossee. Bette writes in both English and in Dutch. Bette is co-founder of the TRQSE Foundation, an international network for artists, scientists, people in media and business, who want to work together on projects with a social element. She is also the co-founder of the Heroines! Movement.
Caoilinn Hughes is the author of THE WILD LAUGHTER (2020), which won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was a finalist for three other awards. Her first novel, ORCHID & THE WASP (2018) won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her short stories have won the Moth Short Story Prize, the Irish Book Awards' Story of the Year 2020, and an O.Henry Prize. Her third novel, THE ALTERNATIVES, is forthcoming from Riverhead in April 2024. She will be a Cullman Fellow at New York Public Library for 2023-2024.
Signed copies are available in store and online at exileinbookville.com and we ship nationally!