Thistle

£12.99 | Nadia de Vries, Translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey

Thistle’s father has been dead for twenty years. He passed away when Thistle was thirteen, and at the time she didn’t really know what death meant. Now, at thirty-three, grief hits her hard. And the world is slowly turning against her. Her furniture has begun to speak, and she suspects her neighbours are up to something. A gang of weasels has taken residence in her home. Thistle desperately wants to return to easier times, when the world was still kind and her body was innocent. Armed with a hard drive full of childhood photos, Thistle attempts to bring her old self back to life – online, where strangers love teenage girls.

Nadia de Vries is a bilingual author from Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She previously published three English poetry collections, including Know Thy Audience (MOIST, 2023), and the academic dissertation Digital Corpses (University of Amsterdam, 2020). Her Dutch prose debut De bakvis (Uitgeverij Pluim, 2022) was longlisted for two of the biggest literary prizes of the Low Countries. It is her first Dutch work to be translated into English.

Sarah Timmer Harvey is a translator and writer currently based in Woodstock, New York. Sarah holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Her translation of Jente Posthuma’s novel What I’d Rather Not Think About was published by Scribe in 2023, and shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize. Reconstruction, Sarah’s translation of short stories by Karin Amatmoekrim, was published by Strangers in 2020. Their work has appeared in numerous publications including Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Gulf Coast and The Los Angeles Review. Born in Australia, Sarah lived and worked in the Netherlands for 14 years before moving to New York City in 2013.