The Miniaturist

This is a debut novel, but one which has been widely praised for its atmospheric treatment of the theme.

The Dutch interiors, so familiar from paintings, here become the setting in the house and in the miniature doll’s house version of it, the setting for a playing out of the injunction of St Luke that “there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed” illustrated in the twisting of the plot.

For many readers this will be the novel of the summer. An actress by training, Jessie Burton brings a sense of both the dramatic and the historical to bear in her first book.

Naella Ottoman comes to live in the house of a rich merchant as the outcome of an arranged marriage. But with the apparatus of a gothic novel, the plot, with perhaps a little too much modern sensibility displayed, develops.