‘Maybe this is the last time he will walk down the familiar corridor as the man called Noon Merckem, that door there on the left with those welcoming panes of glass could mean the end of his existence, weak in the knees like a man being dragged to the gallows, that’s how he feels in this instant’
- Longlisted
- The International Booker Prize 2026
- Published by Scribe UK
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Set in the aftermath of the First World War, this is an extraordinary love story 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.
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 Amand be certain that Julienne is telling the truth? When he comes to doubt her word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion.
In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. The book was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Anjet Daanje
Anjet Daanje is a Dutch writer of novels, short stories and screenplays
More about Anjet Daanje 
David McKay
Born and educated in the United States, David McKay is an award-winning translator of Dutch fiction and non-fiction
More about David McKay A soldier without his memory; a wife in search of her missing husband. The big question at the heart of this superb novel is how far humans will go in order to love
The International Booker Prize 2026 judges
What the judges said
‘A soldier without his memory; a wife in search of her missing husband – if you thought that all war stories were the same, not so. Some years after the Great War, Noon Merckem is found wandering in a field in Belgium, amnesiac and adrift. In time, he is claimed, but it is not so easy to return to an elusive past. In Daanje’s hands, and in McKay’s intuitive translation, the ravages and shellshock of the First World War are superbly traced – but the big question at the heart of this novel is how far humans will go in order to love, how fiercely they will fight for what they intend to have and to hold.’
What the critics said
Tobias Grey, Financial Times
‘The windfalls of war come under the spotlight in Dutch writer Anjet Daanje’s extraordinarily vivid novel The Remembered Soldier… David McKay’s page-turning translation faithfully conveys the propulsive nature of Daanje’s long, sinuous sentences, which multiply the word “and” to build up streams of thoughts, emotions and dreams.’
Other nominated books by David McKay
Stefan Hertmans’ imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the 20th century; a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war
