He resigns himself to taking over his brother’s role and spending the rest of his days ‘with his head under a cow’. After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. ‘A double bed and a duvet’, advises Ada, who lives next door, with a sly look. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm? The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies. Ostensibly a novel about the countryside, as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one’s own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing.

    Filthy rich, devastatingly handsome, and sexy as all hell… JACKSON I don’t do slow and easy. I do fast and hard. I don’t do dates. I do … arrangements. I don’t do romance, love, flowers, hearts, candy, and I sure as hell don’t do marriage. Until my father dies, and decides to leave his company to the first one of his sons to get married. Croft International. The business that’s supposed to be mine. But I didn’t get to be where I am by giving up. I’ll just find a wife. How hard can it be? Until Emily walks into my office, all spitfire and passion, her curves encased in a dress that makes me c*ck throb. I tell myself I’m just using her. I tell myself it’s just business. So what if she doesn’t know that’s what I’m doing? All I have to do is convince her to marry me. But with each moment that passes—each look, each touch, each word out of Emily’s perfect lips—I wonder how I’ll ever survive being tempted by her…