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On the night of January 31 1953, a mountain of water, literally piled up out of the sea by a freak winter hurricane, swept down onto the Netherlands, demolishing the dikes protecting the country and wiping a quarter of its landmass from the map. It was the worst natural disaster to strike the Netherlands in three hundred years.
The morning of the storm, Armanda asks her sister, Lidy, to take her place on a visit to her godchild in the town of Zierikzee. In turn, Armanda will care for Lidy's two-year-old daughter and accompany Lidy’s husband to a party. The sisters, both of them young and beautiful, look so alike that no one may even notice. But what Armanda can’t know is that her little comedy is a provocation to fate: Lidy is headed for the center of the deadly storm.
Margriet de Moor interweaves the stories of these two sisters, deftly alternating between the cataclysm and the long years of its grief-strewn aftermath. While Lidy struggles to survive, surrounded by people she barely knows, Armanda must master the future, trying to live out the life of her missing sister as if it were her own.
A brilliant meshing of history and imagination, The Storm is a powerfully dramatic and psychologically gripping novel from one of Europe’s most compelling writers.
"Despite some rocky moments - events are set in motion by 'a concatenation of different circumstances' - de Moor...pulls off an involving saga of death foretold." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Aspects of this novel recall Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, but this powerful fictional account of facing death and living with loss cuts closer to the bone." - Library Journal
"A laborious translation doesn't help to recommend this otherwise gripping story of dueling Dutch sisters who become separated by a monstrous meteorological anomaly." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Storm 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 the Netherlands in 1941, Margriet de Moor had a career as a classical singer before becoming a novelist. Her debut novel, First Gray, Then White, Then Blue, was a sensational success across Europe, winning her the AKO Literature Prize, for which her second novel, The Virtuoso, was also nominated. She has since published several other novels, including Duke of Egypt and The Kreutzer Sonata. Her books have been translated into twenty languages.
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