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Professor Siem Sigerius - maths genius, jazz lover, judo champion, Renaissance man. When Aaron meets his girlfriend Joni's family for the first time, her multitalented father could hardly be a more intimidating figure, but somehow the underachieving photographer manages to bluff his way to a friendship with the paterfamilias.
With his feet under the table at the beautiful Sigerius farmhouse, Aaron feels part of a perfect family. Until, that is, things start to fall apart. A cataclysmic explosion in a fireworks factory, the advent of Internet pornography, the reappearance of a discarded, dangerous son, and a jet-black wig-all play a role in the spectacular fragmentation of the Sigerius clan...and of Aaron's fragile psyche.
Bonita Avenue is a suspenseful, incendiary and unpredictable debut-of relationships torn apart by lies, and minds destroyed by madness.
"Starred Review. Dutch author Buwalda's magnificent first novel offers proof of Tolstoy's dictum that 'every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'" - Publishers Weekly
"Buwalda's writing, in translation from Dutch, is a cut above the potboiler this might be with more corpses. His strength are sustained scenes that will linger in memory after other parts of the brain have given up on fitting together the pieces of this puzzler." - Kirkus
"One wild ride: a swirling helix of a family saga that swerves from gross-out sex comedy to pitch-black revenge tragedy as twist after twist reframes what we know about its dysfunctional cast." - Telegraph (UK)
"A literary sensation…[A] crazy-paving, jigsaw puzzle...Addictive...A considerable achievement …Bonita Avenue is an entertaining end in itself, and evidence that Buwalda is just getting started." - Independent (UK)
"Fluent and complex, uncompromising and shocking." - Daily Mail (UK)
"This dazzling family saga was a huge hit when it was published in the Netherlands in 2010; critics hailed Buwalda as 'The Dutch answer to Jonathan Franzen', but his brilliance is entirely unique." - The Times (UK)
"Great European art: the Dutchman Peter Buwalda explodes the bourgeois family saga. The narrative pyrotechnics alone are a tour de force." -Die Ziet (Germany)
"It's a fantastic debut which, at over 500 pages, doesn't outstay its welcome." - Glasgow Herald
"No way that this is a debut novel, is your first impression when you start reading Bonita Avenue––but it is! An instant literary classic, loaded with suspense, by a brilliant and truly original writer." - Herman Koch, author of The Dinner and Summerhouse with Swimming Pool
This information about Bonita Avenue was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in Brussels in 1971, Peter Buwalda is a Dutch novelist, formerly a journalist, editor at several publishers, and founder of the literary music magazine Wah-Wah. Bonita Avenue is his debut novel. Published in 2010 to critical acclaim, it was shortlisted for twelve prizes, going on to win the Academica Prize, the Selexyz Debut Prize, the Tzum Prize, the Anton Wachter Prize and the Leesclubboek van het jaar. It spent two years on the bestseller lists, and has since been translated into seven languages.
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