Sunday book pick: ‘My Heavenly Favourite’, a novel about sexual grooming puts the reader in a trance

“I slowly crawled under your skin like a liver fluke in a cow, there isn’t a more pleasant way of putting it: I was a parasite.”

Two thousand and twenty International Booker Prize winner Lucas Rijnevel’s new novel My Heavenly Favourite – translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison – opens with a 49-year-old male narrator “coming straight out with it” to his 14-year-old beloved about the enormous affection he feels for her. He addresses her as though narrating a monologue, or writing a very long letter, to try to convince her that what had transpired between them was an inevitable consequence of his love. It is not perversion – irrespective of what the rest of the world has come to believe.

There are occasional addresses to a “court”, a jury that seems to have forced the narrator to recount the “relationship” from the moment it set into motion. A vet by profession, the narrator was called into the farm by the girl’s father to treat the sick livestock. It was, what one would call popularly, “love at first sight”. The child’s virgin beauty is perceived by him as he would a healthy cow’s – her skin is as tender as an udder and she is of...

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