Set in 17th-century Amsterdam - a city ruled by glittering wealth and oppressive religion - a masterful debut steeped in atmosphere and shimmering with mystery, in the tradition of Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, and Sarah Dunant.

"There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed...."

On a brisk autumn day in 1686, 18-year-old Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her new home, while splendorous, is not welcoming. Johannes is kind yet distant, always locked in his study or at his warehouse office - leaving Nella alone with his sister, the sharp-tongued and forbidding Marin.

But Nella’s world changes when Johannes presents her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. To furnish her gift, Nella engages the services of a miniaturist - an elusive and enigmatic artist whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in eerie and unexpected ways...

Johannes’ gift helps Nella to pierce the closed world of the Brandt household. But as she uncovers its unusual secrets, she begins to understand - and fear - the escalating dangers that await them all. In this repressively pious society where gold is worshipped second only to God, to be different is a threat to the moral fabric of society, and not even a man as rich as Johannes is safe. Only one person seems to see the fate that awaits them. Is the miniaturist the key to their salvation...or the architect of their destruction?

Enchanting, beautiful, and exquisitely suspenseful, The Miniaturist is a magnificent story of love and obsession, betrayal and retribution, appearance and truth.

Listening Length

13 hours and 17 minutes
Author

Jessie Burton
Narrator

Davina Porter
Audible release date

August 26, 2014
Language

English
Publisher

HarperAudio
ASIN

B00K29ZZBS
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	13 hours and 17 minutes
Author	Jessie Burton
Narrator	Davina Porter
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	August 26, 2014
Publisher	HarperAudio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B00K29ZZBS
Best Sellers Rank	#34,962 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #1,445 in Literary Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #2,016 in Historical Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #3,069 in Suspense (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5

7,717 global ratings

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2 star		5%
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Warped Genius

A Somewhat Disappointing Journey

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 10, 2023

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Despite meticulous details about life in 17th century Holland, I failed to get fully engaged in the personal lives of the characters in this book. The secrets they harbor strike me as run of the mill, that is the "usual" clash between private and public life, personal yearnings vs. societal norms, etc. (Same old, same old...)

The reader never gets a satisfactory explanation for the apparently magical effect the (cursed?) miniature house has over the inhabitants of the real house, nor for the mysterious Miniaturist's (nefarious?) intents.

To the author's credit, this is a great introduction to the history of miniatures and the status they represented to their affluent owners in past centuries, perhaps enough to motivate an interest in a craft that is still existing and pursued today.

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S. Warfield

A good historical novel in 1686 Amsterdam

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 29, 2015

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I really liked The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton very much. I love historical novels and especially ones that are well-researched with a smattering of the imagination in it because it gives the author some freedom to work with license to explore her own imagination. I loved the miniature house and what it contained even though there seemed to be a mystical element to the miniaturist. I guess that today's modern dollhouses and their furnishings resemble these in a vague way, but what the rich afforded in 17th century Amsterdam was a far cry from the modest dollhouses that I've seen.

The only way for a woman to survive in the world in 1686 Amsterdam was to try to marry well so that there was enough money for good housing, good food, decent clothes and as much warmth in the winter that could be mustered up. Petronella Oortman, an 18-year-old young women from a small town has already been married to the handsome and wealthy merchant trader Jonannes Brandt in a hurried and casual ceremony in her home town. Now she is at Johannes' home to move in and be his wife. Johannes turns out to be an inattentive husband who is always away on business and Nella is stuck in the house with his stern sister, Marin, and two servants. To keep Nella busy, Johannes buys her a cabinet that is a replica of their home. She can fill it with miniatures or whatever she wants to do with it. She finds a miniaturist who makes tiny figures of the family and some of their friends, but strangely they mimic things that happen.

The miniaturist is a curious character who I would have loved to meet. The book is titled after her, but we never get to formally meet her and never really understand why she stays secluded on the second floor of her house. There is a mystical element to her that I wish the author had explored. However, the historical background and descriptions of 17th century Amsterdam are fascinating. What society and the church expected of people tried to keep them on the straight and narrow, and fire and brimstone sermons went on every worship day to keep the fear of God and priest within the people.

I loved the scenes of people skating on the frozen canals in winter and of Nella's trips out either alone or accompanied by the female servant along Amsterdam's streets. Nella was very independent for her day. What she will have to contend with in the future is something that her independence will serve her well for.

I'm looking forward to another book from Jessie Burton.

5 people found this helpful

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Karen B

Gripping, lyrical tale

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 7, 2014

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This was a hauntingly lovely, deeply sad book that remained with me long after I finished it.

Set in the Golden Age of The Netherlands, in Amsterdam in 1868, The Miniaturist tells the story of young Nelle (Petronella) Oortman who arrives on the doorstep of her new husband's house and, as she crosses the threshold of this tidy, well-ordered home, steps into another world. Her husband, the wealthy, charming Johannes Brandt, lives in a place far removed from Nelle's sheltered and rather Godly life in the country with her mother and younger siblings. In Amsterdam, the heart of trade and merchant-living in Europe, it's guilders before God, and sweet Nelle finds the surface splendour and prim facades disguise deeper and curious as well as highly hypocritical undercurrents.

Swept into a life in which she feels she has no place, she is forced to deal with Johannes demanding sister, Marin, whose aloofness is countered only by her maid, Cornelia, who appears to Nelle to not understand the boundaries between employer and servant. A situation that's made more puzzling by the presence of the coffee-skinned Otto, whose kindness and humanity is, when he leaves the house, disregarded by locals as his exoticness takes over, earning cruel barbs and awful assumptions. Nelle is overwhelmed by all this and prays that love will smooth her path, especially when her husband appears to neglect her.

Then, one day, Johannes buys her a beautiful dolls'-house. It's a huge cabinet - a replica of their place – that he invites her to furnish. Reluctant at first, Nelle acquiesces and hires the services of a superb miniaturist. But when the pieces she commissions are not only exceptionally fulfilled, but rendered in exquisite and intimate detail, she wonders what is going on. They are so life-like, prophetic, full of significance... Alarmed, she eventually reads the pieces and the messages that accompany them as signs of a life she should either aspire to or as a warning of what's to come...

Part mystery, part lyrical portrayal of families and relationships and the complex webs we weave and in which we entrap ourselves and others, The Miniaturist is also an examination of social structures and the lengths people will go to in order to protect their place, their role, conceal their secrets, maintain what to some might be lies but to others are the veneers we must never allow to crack. Burton's understanding and portrayal of the repressed but seething society of Amsterdam of this time is stunning. Her use of the doll's house as an analogy for what goes on behind other closed doors, of how we can be fashioned in another's image, moulded to an ideal, is very clever. I remember seeing these dolls' houses at the Rikjs Museum when I lived in The Netherlands and thought them amazing. Their use here is unique and eerie. Unlike the life-like dolls made for Nelle and which she places inside her doll's house, the characters in Burton's real Dutch houses that abut each other, line the canals and share the repressive joys of community, come to life in ways that are surprising, distressing, utterly gripping and heart-wrenching.

13 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Kindle Customer

A little slow

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 7, 2018

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This is the story of Nella who is married off to a rich man in Amsterdam, she rarely sees her husband in the beginning, he obviously has secrets which we find out fairly quickly, and then there is Marin her sister in law, she is very unfriendly and also has her own secrets to hide. Her husband buys her a dolls house which is a replica of her own house and soon she starts receiving items for it from a miniaturist whose identity is unknown. I enjoyed aspects of this book, however I took ages to get into the story, it's very slow, and also a very sad, dark read. I was also very disappointed with the ending as the main question of the book was left unanswered i thought. It could have done with 1 more chapter to the everything together.

28 people found this helpful

Book Bonkers

"I Fight To Emerge"

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 20, 2018

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This little motto is one of many elliptical messages sent out by The Miniaturist, whose sylph-like presence in the novel traces the growing pains of Nella Brandt during the Dutch Golden Age. The trope of the doll's cabinet is cleverly conceived as it allows Burton to let the feminist coming-of-age theme to mould itself. The narrative works as delicately as a prism, its tortoiseshell and pewter shades refracting 'the more irregular, intimate jumps of an interior life' as the miniaturist authors Nella's story, opening up into little compartments whose inhabitants seem to shape-shift according to the joys and tragedies that beset them in real life. Living among the sumptuous fabrics of Johannes' home, her struggle is to turn them into tapestries of hope, with no one to weave them, she says, but ourselves. Male homosexuality, miscegenation and the struggle for female independence become obstacles in a city where the tradition of the 'Gebuurte', a sort of 17th-century Dutch neighbourhood watch scheme, pries into the private lives of individuals who, like Johannes, try to reach out 'for something his own tongue can never achieve'.

Burton is very good at bringing into the centre ground the importance of sugar. People's prosperity depends on it, yet it symbolises the sickly indulgence of a city saturated in its own opulence against a leering backdrop of Protestant austerity. Amsterdam becomes a terrible victim of its own commercial success. Riddled with hypocrisy, the city drinks from its own poisoned chalice with guilds, merchants and magistrates all vying for position as Nella sets about discovering her true woman's self beyond the cabinet that her husband brings her as compensation for an unconsummated marriage. The Miniaturist, in turning her into one of the puppets, in the end allows her to see into the compartments of her own life, so that she becomes the most powerful magistrate of them all in command of the thing that really matters, her own life as a woman. This is a brilliant debut novel, but the men float too freely, never properly pinned down to those vital dynamic encounters with the crises of their own lives, eluding and escaping instead of engaging with them. Two mottos, the one stating that 'Everything Man Sees He Takes For A Toy. Thus He Is Forever A Boy' and the other that 'Every Woman Is The Architect Of Her Own Fortune' together tend to nullify each other and prevent the evolution of the male characters. Fight to emerge, but relish the ending. It's beautifully done.

17 people found this helpful

Lance Mitchell

Authentic, atmospheric, gripping seventeenth century Amsterdam

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 16, 2019

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This must be the saddest book that I have read for a very long time. The writing is superb. The prose is exquisite and the research adds great authenticity to the characters and to the scenes, which are set in seventeenth century Amsterdam. The atmosphere is palpable and the action is intense.

I became immersed in the characters and quite attached to some of them.

The cruelty and brutality of the protestant religious leaders of the Dutch Republic is appalling. They flex their man-made power in the name of God and they wallow in the satisfaction that the get from their unchallengeable authority. Even the wealth of the merchants is trumped by the pastors.

I loved the mystery that surrounded the wonderful craftmanship of the miniaturist who supplies tiny replicas of people and objects which predict actual events. She is seldom seen and is a prophet of reality. That is rather scary at times.

The story is gripping. This book kept me awake until well after one in the morning on several occasions.

For me, because of the background, the scene-setting, the religious undertones, the character-building and the starkness of society, The Miniaturist struck echoes of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. I mean that as a huge complement to the writing of Jessie Burton.

For a while, I wavered between awarding four stars or five stars because I became irritated by the number of missing inverted commas and apostrophes. However, it would have been very unfair to award less than five stars to a book that gripped me from beginning to end and stirred my emotions so much that I wept many tears for the tragedy.

You must read this book.

8 people found this helpful

Bookworm

Nella and the Miniaturist

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 4, 2017

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I enjoyed this book right up to the last couple of chapters. There seemed to be an intriguing mystery as to who the "Miniaturist" was, and how he/she was able to predict events in the heroine, Nella's life within the secretive Amsterdam household. The story is well written, and interesting up to a point, but I felt let down at the end, because the Miniaturist's identity was never revealed, neither was his/hers apparent ability to predict future events. It turned out to be a damp squib, in my opinon. Otherwise an interesting read.

24 people found this helpful

Kindle Customer

A five star read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 11, 2022

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This is a beautifully written book set 400 years ago in Amsterdam, so there are similarities between this and '' The Firl With The Pearl Earring''.
The story begins with the main character getting married and moving to her wealthy husband' s mansion. However, when she arrives there are a few surprises in store, and some of these are not pleasant.
One surprise is an oversized kind of dolls house. At first she is disappointed because she wants to be the lady of her house, and not the curator of a dolls house.
I researched the dolls house phenomenon and this type of a miniature house around that time was a great symbil of wealth and importance.
As the story continues, we discover that the dolls House and the miniaturist who produces the dolls House models has a part to play in the stories of the characters in this great historical fiction novel.
I rate The Miniaturist a five star read. I loved it.

One person found this helpful

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