These fruits hold a glamour of sorts, but also the promise of something beyond their stuffy society. The House of Fortune is beautifully described: it’s a book that shows the changes of the year and how, despite any wealth they may have had, the eighteenth-century citizens of Amsterdam ate seasonally and were amazed by a pineapple or a mango. It’s difficult to write about without revealing its secrets, but it follows Thea as she falls in clandestine love and the repercussions of this, for herself and for her family.

It also demonstrates how you can never shake off your past, especially when the eponymous miniaturist returns to disrupt the house.

Whereas The Miniaturist showed the desperation of life in a gilded cage, The House of Fortune shows what it is like when this cage loses its gilt. A fat cat, Lucas, lazes around the house as one of the only outward displays of their lost wealth. Thea is the child who remains, raised by her African-Surinamese father Otto, once a servant of the house, her aunt, Nella (the protagonist of The Miniaturist), and their servant, Cordelia. The house echoes with the presence of these ghosts, filling the spaces where their possessions once were, now sold to sustain those who are left, existing in small, warm pockets of a draughty monument. Its original owners are dead, one of them executed for the crime of sodomy, the other dead in childbirth. Picking up the story eighteen years after The Miniaturist, The House of Fortune returns to the beautiful house on the Herengracht, in Amsterdam, where we left it.

Sequel to the miniaturist