We and Me
The reader lands in the midst of an upper-class world teeming with dramas large and small, where love, truth and ambition are regularly at odds.
The Vandersanden family live on top of a hill in Flanders. The neurotic, aristocratic Mieke combs her carpets and keeps a close eye on her family and neighbours. Her husband, the self-made man Stefaan, has made a career for himself in a scandal-plagued pharmaceutical company. Daughter Sarah, overprotected and curious about real life, is trying to find a path for herself, but will she fall prey to a major family secret or can she, on her own, break the old pattern?
An impressive Bildungsroman. The story is played out in her gorgeous language.NRC Handelsblad
‘We and Me’ is a brilliant, astute family novel, full of intriguing characters sketched with great psychological insight and compassion. The book takes the measure of the modern European, and demonstrates the strength of family ties.
With her sublime, quirky pen, Saskia De Coster paints the tragic and the comic in a novel that is as much a literary ‘Desperate Housewives’ as a European answer to Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’.
A bitterly angry and amusing novel. De Coster places her protagonists on the operating table and dissects them cold-bloodedly.Spiegel Online
The great Flemish Novel is not dead. It is just written by Saskia de Coster. ‘We and Me’ is a novel that has stayed with me. Rock solid and unforgettable.Herman Koch
