ABOUT THE BOOK

Teenagers Lisa and Victor are closer than a brother and sister have any right to be. So close that they smother and suffocate one another, yanking and wrestling their lives and emotions into a tangled knot. In the flat, damp wooded fen that is their homeland, while their sarcastic father and impotent mother recede from influence, Lisa and Victor grow into loud, aggressive, foul-mouthed loners who are able to find peace and comfort only when alone together - at school, at home, in bed.

Fearful of and drawn to exposure all at once, the intensity of their incestuous relationship - and of their sensitivities and frustrations - requires a dramatic outcome. Whisky-fuelled, taboo-blind and sharp-tongued, The Happy Hunting Grounds is a long, long day's journey into night, an unnervingly compelling tale from the marshy great plains of the northern Netherlands.

Nanne Tepper was born in 1962, and is the author of three published novels. The Happy Hunting Grounds is his first, for which he received the Anton Wachter Prize, given for the best debut of the preceding two years. He writes about British and American literature for a leading Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, and currently lives in Groningen in the northern Netherlands.