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–leaving Nella alone with his sister, the sharp-tongued and forbidding Marin.But Nella's life 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. In this repressively pious society where gold is worshipped second only to God, to be different is a threat to the moral fabric of society, and not even a man as rich as Johannes is safe. 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, beautifully written, and exquisitely suspenseful, The Miniaturist is a magnificent story of love and obsession, betrayal and retribution, appearance and truth.
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Dedication
Contents
Author’s Note
Epigraphs
Prologue
Part One
Outside In
Cloak
New Alphabet
Trompe l’Oeil
The Gift
Trespasses
Smit’s List
On the Kalverstraat
Delivery
Barge
Marriage Parties
Study
Steps
Boom and Bloom
The Wife
Exchanges
The Deserted Girl
Part two
Inside Out
Decisions
Tales
Eight Dolls
Written in the Water
The Boy on the Ice
The Rebel
The Fox Is Feverish
Cracks
Part three
Stains
Sweet Weapons
The Empty Space
The Witness
Souls and Purses
Escape
Horseshoe
Hidden Bodies
No Anchor
Part four
Spores
Stadhuis
Verkeerspel
The Hopeful Loaf
Wild Beasts Must Be Tamed by Men
The Actor
The Guilder and the Doll
Arrival
The Tale-Teller
Daughters
A Closing Door
Empty Rooms
The Canker in the Orchard
Degrees of Being Alive
Millstone
Part Five
Nova Hollandia
Thank you
A Seventeenth-Century Dutch Glossary
Salary Comparisons at the End of the Seventeenth-Century in Amsterdam
Sample Household Costs of a Wealthy Amsterdammer in the Late 1600s