Just So Stories

Anjet Daanje (trans. David McKay)

Scribe Publications

June 2025

ISBN (13):9781761380136

RRP:$37.99

Ok, so I haven’t actually read this one yet but putting in the deets for you all to finish off this week of tributes for the 80th Anniversary. This is a mammoth book – almost 600 pages – and I just haven’t had the time to commit to it. But now that I’ve finished my Tony Curtis biography which was my ‘beach’ read for our weekends up the coast the last month or so, this one is taking it’s place. Here’s a blurb and a link to other reviews for your edification. I haven’t read the other reviews because I never read others before I write mine but I’m sure you can figure out if this one has appeal for you. I will say the blurb makes it sound a top notch all-rounder: drama, history, romance and the backdrop of war and trauma.

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?

In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve.

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