Sunny Home

Nothing in this enlargement of a summer snapshot taken in 1940 on the Scheveningen Boulevard would at first glance suggest that I would take my stepfather's life at the age of 20. In retrospect, after reading 'Sunny Home', this mother-and-son scene clearly takes on an illustrative character, even something predictable...
The novel Sunny Home is the second part of a cycle in which Otto Veenhoven describes his own youth. Sunny Home was preceded in 1994 by `Rosanne`, a love thriller, in which an idyll in France in the fifties is central. The third part of the cycle (Manonna, also a love thriller) is in preparation.
Veenhoven has had an eventful life. He worked in construction, as a sailor and practically all other of the well-known twelve trades. In 1958 he became a journalist at Het Vrije Volk, a few years later he switched to the advertising world. In the seventies and eighties he worked as a scriptwriter for youth magazines such as Donald Duck and Tina. At the end of the eighties he considered the time had come to start working on his first novel.