A run-down hotel on a bare plain: the only hiding place for a girl in the rain. Once inside, a fox offers her a chair. A suspicious rat acts like he has met her before. But she can’t remember anything. Not even her own name…. At the hotel she finds more questions than answers. She hears piano music, but can’t find the piano. And what about the pieces of paper flying around the plain? While she tries to mend these pieces together, the pieces in her mind start to come together as well. And then she remembers the question she really wants to be answered. DEPARTURE TIME is an amazing journey of a girl in two stories. There is the girl in the hotel with the fox and the rat. And there is the girl with a father who travels a lot and who suggests to write a story together. A story about talking animals. But she doesn’t want to. She is angry with him, because he can’t make her birthday in time. Again. The two stories slowly start to intertwine and come together in a surprising ending.

Author
Truus Matti has been an editor at the Frederik Muller Academy and a production assistant in publishing. She attended the Rietveld Academy and worked in film and animation before devoting herself to writing. Departure Time is her first novel.

Translator
Nancy Forest-Flier grew up in a Dutch-American milieu in the United States and studied English literature and creative writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, graduating cum laude in 1971. She works as a freelance English-language editor and Dutch-English translator and specializes in museum translation, the fine arts, literary translation, religion and current affairs.

Departure Time
Truus Matti
Translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier
2010, namelos
ISBN: 978-1608980093