Synopsis
In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje constructs an intricate literary mystery around the life and afterlife of a nineteenth-century writer named Eliza May Drayden. Living in the small Yorkshire village of Bridge Fowling, Eliza is an intensely private woman whose single novel, Haeger Mass, acquires a strange and enduring reputation only after her death.
The story unfolds across almost three hundred years, with each new section introducing another generation of characters attempting to understand Eliza, her writing, and the unsettling events surrounding her life. Sisters, scholars, lovers, and descendants encounter fragments of the mystery from different perspectives, their accounts overlapping and contradicting one another. Diaries, manuscripts, poetry, drawings, ghostly encounters, and literary scholarship gradually become pieces of an elaborate puzzle.
Moving between historical fiction, Gothic mystery, philosophical inquiry, and reflections on science and mortality, Daanje explores the strange power stories can have over those who create them and those who inherit them. Repeated images and patterns echo across generations, suggesting that literature may preserve truths that history cannot fully explain.
Originally published in Dutch in 2022 and translated by David McKay, The Song of Stork and Dromedary is an ambitious, recursive novel about literary obsession, sisterhood, death, artistic legacy, and the human desire to find meaning in an unknowable world.
About the Author
Anjet Daanje is a Dutch novelist, screenwriter, and translator whose work has received major literary recognition in the Netherlands and Belgium. Her fiction is known for its complex structures, psychological depth, and interest in memory, history, and the ways people construct stories around one another.
David McKay is an award-winning translator of Dutch fiction and nonfiction. He has lived in and around The Hague since 1997 and has translated several major works of Dutch and Flemish literature, including Daanje's The Remembered Soldier and Stefan Hertmans's War and Turpentine.
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
FSG Originals
Publication Date
August 18, 2026
Format
Trade Paperback
Pages
736
Subjects
Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction; Fiction in Translation; Dutch Literature; Gothic Fiction; Literary Mystery; Women Writers; Sisters; Art and Literature; Memory; Death; World Literature
ISBN
9780374620615
