Seeing the Sea
by Koos Meinderts
Description
They were both going to climb the chimney. That was what they had agreed. They wanted to know if you could see the sea from up there, beyond the dunes. In the end, only John climbs up. Con watches him fall to his death and runs off. Hours later, when he’s told that his friend is dead, he pretends to be shocked, as if he knows nothing about it. Years later, looking back on that traumatic event from his youth, the time has come to tell the story.
I stood below and watched while John climbed the chimney, singing as he went. When he got to the top, he waved triumphantly. He shouted something that I couldn’t quite understand – ‘I saw the sea!’, could that have been it? – and then he fell and I ran home: nothing happened, nothing happened.
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Marketing Information
Winner of the 2016 Book Lion
Nominated for the Dioraphte
Literatour Prize and the Flemish Children’s Jury Award
Theme: timeless and universal
Reviews
‘It’s incredibly beautiful, the way the writer takes a brief moment from the past and expands it into something so large.’
- Het Parool (Dutch newspaper)
‘(…) exciting from the very beginning to the very end.
Seeing the Sea is a book to cherish. Brilliantly done.’
- JaapLeest.nl (children’s book reviews)
‘Seeing the Sea sparkles with humour, compassion and love and in the way it is staged, making it a young adult novel for all ages.’
- Edward van de Vendel (Dutch
author)
Author Biography
Koos Meinderts (The Hague, 1953) made his debut as a writer in 1983 with Mooi meegenomen. He writes stories, poems and song lyrics for children and adults.
Shared Stories (part of VBK Uitgevers B.V.)
Shared Stories is the in-house rights agency non-fiction and children's and YA titles of the Dutch VBK Publishing Group, representing the publishing houses AnkhHermes, De Fontein, Houtekiet, Kok|Omniboek, Kosmos, Luitingh-Sijthoff, Mozaïek and Ten Have.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher De Fontein
- Orginal LanguageDutch
- ReadershipTeenage/Young Adult
- Publish StatusPublished
- Original Language TitleDe Zee Zien
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