Consequences

An amazing game of mirrors. [...] Original and promising. -LE MONDE2014 Anton Wachter Prize for Best First NovelGolden Book Owl Reader's Choice AwardOpzij Feminist Literature Prize2014 Lucy B. & C.W. van der Hoogt PrizeNominated for the John Leonard Prize, National Book Critics CircleMEET MINNIE PANIS, a young and talented conceptual artist navigating love affairs, her unexpected success in the art world, and her relationship with an emotionally distant mother. After surviving a near-death experience falling through the ice during her ultimate artwork, Minnie begins to uncover the truth behind her premature birth with the help of the doctor who saves her life-as it turns out-twice. Entering into his clinic, whose motto is All the fish needs is to get lost in the water, Minnie arrives at the border of life's ebb, where meaningful art and revelations occur. An intimate, often humorous exploration of the intertwining cycles of death, rebirth and coincidence, The Consequences is a Bildungsroman that echoes far beyond the last page. Nina Weijers' remarkable, inventive novel depicts a contemporary conceptual artist at the height of her fame, whose blase art project has unintended consequences. Weijers invokes Kurt Vonnegut in the course of the narrative, and this novel shares Vonnegut's sense of how things can be simultaneously real and absurd. Movies and books notoriously fail to capture the social and spiritual atmosphere of the contemporary art world, but Weijers nails it. Her book is beautifully written, surprising and often profound. -CHRIS KRAUS