In the tempestuous summer of 2005, a local veterinarian becomes enraptured by a 14-year-old farmer’s daughter – his ‘favourite’ – as he tends her father’s cows. This deeply troubled soul is our narrator: a man who believes he offers the object of his love a tantalizing path out of the constrictions of her conservative rural life, a chance to escape to a world of fantasy. But the obsessive reliance he cultivates builds into a terrifying trap, with a crime and confession at the heart of it that threatens to rip their small community apart.

An unflinching excavation of taboos and social norms, My Heavenly Favourite is a torrent of grief and obsession. The remarkable and chilling successor to Lucas Rijneveld’s international sensation, The Discomfort of Evening, this profane novel is powered by the paradoxical beauty of its prose, which holds the reader fast to the page.