The Suncatchers
Luka Bakker meets the charismatic Espen De Cleene in an awkward moment at a market in Amsterdam, but then he vanishes from her life as quickly as he’d appeared. A few months later, another chance encounter brings them back together.
With Espen, two other men enter into her life who become her best friends: Espen’s brother, Bas, and his friend, Stijn.
Luka, a cartographer, designs the order of her life like the charts she creates—carefully mapped outcomes. She is consumed by Espen’s energy and unshakable sense of purpose, which she feels she lacks. Luka has a strong bond with her maternal grandmother, who, along with her mother, are the two women she admires and respects the most. Yet she doesn’t recognize their strength in herself.
But her sense of duty toward her parents creates conflict between her and the outspoken, independent Espen. She often reverts back to the stories and sun myths her father told her as a child, and they become her way of making sense of circumstances she is unable to control.
Luka needs to find faith in her inner compass when her smooth sailing ship is unexpectedly caught in a storm, and it feels impossible to steer her way out of it.
The Suncatchers is a novel about how our relationships shape our views of the world around us and the line between independence and loyalty. It is also about accepting life and love’s sometimes inevitable outcomes, and the value of our human inter-connectedness.
I enjoyed my research on this story.
The Netherlands was an easy choice for my main setting. The Dutch are a cool and progressive nation. Even though they're a small country, they make an enormous contribution to science, innovation and the arts.
The research I'd done doesn't even scratch the surface of the incredible work scientists do across the globe in order to make our everyday lives better and our environment more sustainable. I have immense respect and admiration for them. They are often underpaid, underfunded and unappreciated.
I hope that I've shed some light on a couple of amazing fields in science, too, and given the people behind the scenes a more human face through my characters.
In fictional writing, one strives to do justice to a place's culture, and I have tried to give as true a representation of what I've learned about the Dutch. Please forgive me where I may have slipped, but mostly, I hope that you'll enjoy Luka's story.