There’s a peculiar austerity to Jessie Burton’s writing. It’s interesting that she should have started her career – with the million-selling The Miniaturist (2014) – in Amsterdam during the last years of the Dutch golden age, when the wealth of the Calvinist Netherlands was matched only by its thrift and industriousness. That atmosphere of severity and opulence seems to have fed through to Burton’s prose at a formal level. Her writing is both removed and dignified, although this coldness is counteracted by an almost obsessive intimacy with the physical world. Objects illuminate the rooms around them; she is brilliant on the way that dress and decoration speak loudly of the personality and aspirations of those who possess them.
After two more or less contemporary novels, The Muse (2016) and The Confession (2019), and two books for younger readers, The Restless Girls (2018) and Medusa (2021), Burton has returned to the world of The Miniaturist for her fourth novel for adults. It’s always tricky to review a sequel without spoiling the first book for those who are yet to read it. Let us say that The Miniaturist ended with a birth and two deaths, and a new order imposed on the Brandt house on the Golden Bend of the Herengracht Canal.
