The Song of Stork and Dromedary

Inspired by the life and work of Emily Bronte, this masterful, multi-award-winning book – acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century – pulls readers into a narrative that redefines time itself.

In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May’s only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it’s labelled as ‘ghastly’ and ‘immoral’. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own.

In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May – both before and after her death – unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister’s letters; her biographers’ words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later.

In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontes themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death.

‘If just for once in my career as a literary critic, I could award six stars instead of the maximum of five, I would award them this week – to The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje, a novel that left me so overwhelmed that I have not yet fully recovered … I have never had a reading experience like this one, and I don’t know if I will ever again be so impressed by a book.’
-Thomas de Veen, NRC Handelsblad

‘This is a book for the ages, a feat of translation and imagination that I lost myself in for many hours (and at 720 pages, there is no exaggeration there) and longed to return to whenever I was doing anything but reading it … E xtremely moving … A literary mystery, a ghost story, a piece of contemporary gothic fiction, a perfect work of style and substance, a novel that admires the reader and acknowledges the transformative act of reading itself, this is truly a book like no other: a knockout piece of publishing in the year 2026.’
-Alison Huber, Readings

‘The reader advances across Mr. McKay’s superb translation as though compelled by a fierce highland wind. In the book’s telling, the Drayden sisters’ imaginative visions are so powerful that they reshape the way people experience reality. Readers, too, will finish this vast, teeming novel with a sense of a world transformed.’
-Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal