Listen - Paperback

by Sacha Bronwasser (Author), David Colmer (Translator)

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2025

A twisty, slow-burn mystery set in Paris and the Netherlands that has become a Dutch sensation

In 1989, twenty-year-old Marie jumps at the chance to work as au pair in Paris--even though it means dropping out of her prestigious art program in the Netherlands. The city, the language, the complicated French family she works for all quickly overshadow the turmoil and pain she'd been reckoning with in school.

But years later, during the 2015 attacks in Paris, Marie is shocked to recognize her former teacher, the main reason she fled the Netherlands, pictured in aftermath, in the exact arrondissement where her previous employers live. The past she was sure she could leave behind comes flooding back, as do the questions she thought she could live with leaving unanswered.

Told in alternating voices, this "highly ingenious" (NRC) coming-of-age story asks important and haunting questions about the thin line between remembering and recording, seeing and being seen, coincidence and fate, revenge and reclamation--and what it means to walk this boundary.

Author Biography

Sacha Bronwasser is a Dutch writer and art historian. For decades, she worked as art critic for De Volkskrant, while also curating exhibitions and writing and speaking about contemporary art for radio, television and on stage. In 2019, she made her fiction debut with the highly praised novel Niets is Gelogen, followed by the bestselling Luister (Listen) in 2023 and the short story collection De Lotgevallen in 2024. Listen was nominated for multiple literary awards, has been translated into several languages, and is currently being adapted into a feature film. Bronwasser lives on the Dutch coast.

David Colmer is the translator of more than eighty book-length works of Dutch-language literature and has won many prizes for his translations, including the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, both with novelist Gerbrand Bakker.