A modern masterpiece, voted the greatest Dutch novel of all time

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‘I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.’

Twenty-three-year-old Frits – office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes – finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.

This is the story of ten evenings in Frits’s life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city streets and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him.

Darkly funny and mesmerising, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty.

Reviews

A masterpiece… What can I say that will put this book where it belongs, in readers’ hands and minds?… Reve keeps the reader breathless right through to the grand finale

Guardian

A masterwork of comic pathos… one of the finest studies of youthful malaise ever written… Should cause many readers to revise their opinions of The Catcher in the Rye. In all fairness to Salinger, The Evenings is so much better

Irish Times

I was also pleased to see Gerard Reve’s funny, poignant debut novel, The Evenings, available in English… it’s like BS Johnson and Kafka wandering the crepuscular streets of 1940s Amsterdam together – in a good way

Observer Books of the Year 2016

Gives Kafka a run for his money… gripping, often very funny… bizarre, enchanting

Big Issue

Dark masterpiece… It is a powerful story of an alienated young office worker who is cynical about his loving, middle-class parents and friends

Observer

Surely the funniest novel ever written about boredom… The translation by Sam Garrett is perfect

Observer, Books of the Year 2017

The funniest, most exhilarating novel about boredom ever written. If The Evenings had appeared in English in the 1950s, it would have become every bit as much a classic as On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye.

A Meursault-in-waiting, a blank Holden Caulfield, a precursor to the kid in Iain Bank’s The Wasp Factory. Very good

Evening Standard

This 1947 Dutch novel, considered the Netherlands’ greatest in the 20th century… is a savage novel, full of strange, cold laughter

Daily Mail

Reve’s keen eye for absurdity manages to cast the mundane in a new, albeit macabre, light

Financial Times

The Evenings is packed with the minutiae of life: luckily, the minutiae are fascinating… Reve isn’t the kind of novelist to give you a straightforward answer but the journey is quite a ride

The Times

A classic of dry, dark humour… it captures a very specific flavour of ennui

Herald

Fascinates the more you read of it… A fantastic novel

Sunday Telegraph

The novel is dark, funny, unsettling and lingers vividly in the mind. Hats off to Pushkin Press and the outstanding translator, Sam Garrett, for making this odd, orphaned masterpiece available at last to an English-speaking readership

Times Literary Supplement

It is now time for a wider audience to discover its weird textures and dark delighs

The National

Unlike John Williams, Gerard Reve’s work was critically acclaimed and sold exceptionally well during his lifetime. But, just like Stoner, The Evenings is brilliantly written, and has a maximum impact on the reader’s soul.

Gerard Reve’s sardonic classic The Evenings is finally translated into English

Culturetrip

This book, an important classic in the Netherlands and long, long overdue in English, is as funny as it is peculiar. Reve really deserves more attention in the Anglophone world

Darkly funny and mesmerizing, The Evenings takes the tiny quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty… an extraordinary and highly recommended addition to both community and academic library collections

Wisconsin Bookwatch