Seeing New York be blown up by aliens, London submerged under glaciers in a new Ice Age or Tokyo trampled by Godzilla is old hat, but seeing your own neighbourhoods being smashed by the after effects of a comet hitting Earth, that’s something else entirely. On The Edge Of Gone is Corinne Duyvis’ second novel, an apocalyptical survival science fiction story that takes place in and around Amsterdam. As such it’s an entirely different feeling when it isn’t people desparately trying to escape the Bronxy to flee for the safety of New Jersey, but rather have the heroine trying to make her way from Schiphol to Gorichem and the dubious safety of the shelter they were promised a place in…
It’s also interesting that Duyvis has chosen to set her novel here in the Netherlands when she’s writing for a mostly American audience; I don’t expect many readers will be familiar with Amsterdam outside of the tourist hot spots, if at all. Thomas Olde Heuvelt meanwhile has rewritten his fantasy novel Hex to move it from the Netherlands to upstate New York to make it more accessible for the US market. Two different strategies from two Dutch writers looking for foreign success. Duyvis held a book presentation a few months back at the ABC here in Amsterdam in which she explained her reasons for writing her novel the way she did, as shown in the video above.
