The Miniaturist

Petronella (Nella) Oortman, an 18-year-old country girl of an old impoverished family, from the beautiful Dutch countryside village of Assendelft, arrives at the Golden Bend home in Amsterdam of the wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt, whom she married a month earlier. She steps into a house of secrets held by Brandt's ascetic sister Marin, the servants Cornelia and Otto, and Brandt himself, who treats her more like a friend than a wife.

Brandt gives her as a wedding present of a doll's house designed to look like their nine-room home in miniature, and she engages the services of a local miniaturist to add realistic furnishings to it. The miniaturist, whom she never meets, begins sending her lifelike dolls and furnishings that are eerily accurate and even seem to predict the future. As a web of danger gradually ensnares the characters, Nella wonders if everyone's fate lies in the miniaturist's hands.[4][5]

The doll's house that inspired the novel

Burton, who had studied English literature at the University of Oxford before embarking on an acting career, wrote the novel over a period of four years while supporting herself as an actress and PA in the City of London.[3][5] She came up with the idea while on holiday in Amsterdam, where she viewed Petronella Oortman's doll house at the Rijksmuseum, and undertook extensive research on 17th-century Amsterdam, studying books, cookbooks, Dutch Golden Age paintings, maps, and wills.[2][3][5] She trimmed the word count from 120,000 words to 80,000 words after participating in a creative writing course in 2011 and to better match the marketing target readership.[5]

The novel was the focus of a publishers' bidding war at the 2013 London Book Fair.[2] Of the 11 publishers that vied for the book, Picador won the UK and British Commonwealth rights for a reported six-figure sum.[5][6]

The UK cover design is a photograph of an actual miniature doll's house commissioned by Picador, which reflects characters and elements in the novel.[1][6]

By 2016, the book had sold over 1 million copies in 37 countries.[4]

While applauding the tone and setting of the novel, some reviews cited the shallowness of the characterizations. The Guardian and Chicago Tribune reviews observe that Nella is drawn more like a worldly, feminist 21st-century girl than a naïve 17th-century one.[7][8] The Chicago Tribune adds: "[The main characters are] complex and complicated and suffer terrible tragedies, but Burton doesn't give us a deep enough look into their psyches. I'd read 100 additional pages just to get inside Johannes' head".[8]

• 2014 Waterstones "Book of the Year" winner for The Miniaturist[9]
• 2014 Specsavers National Book Awards: New Writer of the Year for The Miniaturist[2]
• 2014 Specsavers National Book Awards: Book of the Year for The Miniaturist[10]

In 2015 the novel also received a nomination for the Desmond Elliott Prize.[11]

BBC One debuted a three-part, 2.5-hour television adaptation of the novel in the UK on 26 December 2017.[12][4][13] The adaptation was written by John Brownlow, directed by Guillem Morales, and produced by The Forge in conjunction with the BBC and Masterpiece.[4][14] The series was filmed on location Leiden in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It starred Anya Taylor-Joy as Nella, Romola Garai as Marin, Emily Berrington as The Miniaturist, and Alex Hassell as Johannes.[13] Episode 1 was seen by 4.52 million viewers and Episode 2 by fewer than 4.31 million viewers.[15]

• Girl with a Pearl Earring, an historical novel based in 17th-century Delft.

• The Miniaturist on IMDb