THE FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF A POSTWAR MASTERPIECE 'I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.' Twenty-three-year-old Frits - office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes - finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit. This is the story of ten evenings in Frits's life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city street and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him. Darkly funny and mesmerising,  The Evenings  takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty. IPPY Literary Fiction Award Bronze Medalist An Observer , Financial Times , and Irish Times Book of the Year "Exceptional... a crisp and readable translation by Sam Garrett." — The Wall Street Journal "Fascinating, hilarious, and page-turning. The publication of this novel marks the exciting introduction of a wonderful writer to an Anglophone audience."   — Publishers Weekly "Reviewers have compared it favorably to J .D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye , Albert Camus’s The Stranger  and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle . In The Irish Times , Eileen Battersby called it 'one of the finest studies of youthful malaise ever written,' and in The Guardian , Tim Parks described it as 'not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manqué of modern European literature.'  The Society of Dutch Literature ranked it as the country’s best 20th-century novel and its third-best of all time." — The New York Times "Sam Garrett’s precise and convincing translations ... capture the consistently anxious, suggestive, and haunting tone that runs through  The Evenings  like a live wire—one that, after seventy years, is still electrifying. The narrators of  The Fall of the Boslowits Family  and  Werther Nieland , too, are persuasively rendered in the matter-of-fact and dreamlike tones of the originals."  — Philip Huff,  New York Review of Books "Diabolically funny... From the deep midnight of shattered Europe, Reve crafted not only an existential masterwork worthy to stand with Beckett or Albert Camus but an oblique historical testament."  — The Economist "A novel as funny as it is painful . . . A little masterpiece — a provocative reminder that life goes on even in the bleakest of circumstances."  — Los Angeles Review of Books "Captivating." — The Atlantic "In this first English translation of a Dutch classic . . . The author’s dry wit and ability to find humor and beauty in the banality of daily life are impressive." —  Booklist “Not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manque of modern European literature… what can I say, in a world of hype, that will put this book where it belongs, in readers’ hands and minds?... Reve’s sparkling collage of acute observation, droll internal monologue and pitch-perfect dialogue keeps the reader breathless right through to the grand finale...huge respect to Pushkin Press.” — Tim Parks,  The Guardian "One of the greatest post-war Dutch novels... [a] brilliant modern classic."  — Tom Chalmers,  Publishers Weekly "Consistently simple, straightforward, pitch-perfect prose (translated splendidly by Sam Garrett)." — Weekly Standard "Darkly funny and mesmerizing, The Evenings takes the tiny quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty… an extraordinary and highly recommended addition to both community and academic library collections’." — Midwest Book Review "a neurotic, darkly humorous and cynical treatise on youth in the Netherlands after World War II. . . the book is innovative in its use of language. Reve successfully evokes a strong sense of psychological unrest in the mind of reader." — Out and About Nashville "drily amusing, suffused with angst and post-war malaise and -- at first blush -- very impressive." — BookFilter "It’s a testament to Reve’s writing and imagination that the question of Frits will haunt the reader long after they’re finished." — Pop Matters "A classic of dry, dark humour… it captures a very specific flavour of ennui." —  Herald "I warmly recommend Gerard Reve’s hilariously gloomy  The Evenings … I see it as a Dutch version of Kafka’s  Metamorphosis."  —  Observer   "A Meursault-in-waiting, a blank Holden Caulfield, a precursor to the kid in Iain Bank’s  The Wasp Factory . Very good." —  Evening Standard "As a study of aimlessness in postwar Europe it is difficult, perhaps impossible to surpass."  — Irish Times "This much lauded book, finally available in English, [is] the perfect January read." — The Spectator "The novel is dark, funny, unsettling and lingers vividly in the mind. Hats off to Pushk