My Heavenly Favourite

Transcendent . . . A successor to rival Nabokov's anti-hero . . . The audaciousness of My Heavenly Favourite lies instead in Rijneveld's willingness to linger inside the mind of a monster . . . Hutchison has ably invested her translation with unnerving poetry. ― Financial Times

Both characters are marvellous creations, at once highly aestheticised and chillingly convincing . . .
My Heavenly Favourite squares up deliberately to Lolita, citing it throughout, and Rijneveld compares well with Nabokov in the richness of his invention and the delicacy of his prose, while taking a much more serious approach to their shared subject. Indeed, Rijneveld conveys the squalor and despair of sexual violence with more fidelity than any other author I have read . . . But this novel is not only a surprisingly successful treatment of a difficult subject . . . A dazzling addition to the oeuvre of an author of prodigious gifts.

― Guardian (Book of the Day)

Graphic, unsettling and brilliantly written . . . My Heavenly Favourite does a superb job of rendering the language of obsessive love - you and me versus the world - as a kind of sickness. ― Daily Telegraph *****

The whirling delirium of its cyclone-force prose [traps] you in a nightmarish vortex . . . Even as expertly timed detonations tilt our understanding of events, darkening the depravity yet further, the book's real draw lies in its between-the-lines portrait of the pulverising impact of grief on the girl's family. ― Observer

Rijneveld's genius for minute attention to the granular detail of pain, desire, fantasy and transgression doesn't allow for any comfortable distance . . . You're right there in it. And in Hutchison's electrifying translation it is genuinely disturbing. -- Max Porter

A novel of exquisite discomfort and delicious poetry. Rijneveld writes with peerless moral courage
and a sheer delight in the abject that we must each face in ourselves. This book unsettled me even as it
made me laugh and gasp.

-- Brandon Taylor

Here lies writing that is rejuvenating, glorious, brilliant . . . How lucky we are to be the readers of
Rijneveld's work.

-- Daisy Johnson

Daring, immediate and insistent . . . A profound imagining of abuse and its ramifications. This is
fiction that balances darkness and purity, deceit and reality, depravity and lyricism. A quaking,
visceral novel that demands the reader look wickedness in the eye - not for shock alone, but to
provoke a genuine examination of what it is to harm and transgress.

-- Rebecca Watson