Jessie Burton

On a brisk autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her new home, while splendorous, is not welcoming. Johannes is kind yet distant, always locked in his study or at his warehouse office. But Nella's world changes when Johannes presents her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. To furnish her gift, Nella engages the services of a miniaturist–an elusive and enigmatic artist whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in eerie and unexpected ways . . . Johannes's gift helps Nella pierce the closed world of the Brandt household. But as she uncovers its unusual secrets, she begins to understand–and fear–the escalating dangers that await them all. Only one person seems to see the fate that awaits them. Is the miniaturist the key to their salvation . . . or the architect of their destruction? Enchanting and exquisitely suspenseful, The Miniaturist is a magnificent story of love and obsession, betrayal and retribution.

A Novel

The Miniaturist LP

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"True love was a flower in the gut, its petals unfurling inside out. You would risk all for love—blissful, never without its drops of dismay."

"How do I begin to love you?—the question, enormous, impossible to ignore, goes round and round in her head as she stares at him."

"When you have truly come to know a person, Nella—when you see beneath the sweeter gestures, the smiles—when you see the rage and the pitiful fear which each of us hide—then forgiveness is everything."

"She closes her eyes, remembering her mother's words—the girl wants love. She wants the peaches and the cream."

"And love has to come, otherwise I cannot live."

"I'd prefer to rise in love, she thinks—lifting up to the clouds, not plunging to the earth. She pictures herself, weightless and adored, delirious in ecstasy."

"For what am I, she wonders, but a product of my own imagination?"

"I will fight to emerge, she thinks—but the problem is that Nella has no idea where she is emerging. A dead end, she supposes. The end of a sack, a mute and feeble existence."

"She wants to be splintered by the cold, transfigured by the light. The canal path is empty, the ice a ribbon of white silk between the Herengracht houses. The moon above is larger than she has ever seen it, larger even than last night; an astonishing pale circle of power. It looks as if she could reach out and touch it, that God has pushed it down from the heavens for her human hand to hold."

"She wants to wash him from tip to toe, to make him fresh again, make him smell of spice, cardamom caught in the nail."

The Miniaturist LP quotes

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