Language: Dutch. English translation (The Tea Lords) here.

Rudolf Kerkhoven leaves his comfortable origins in Delft by ship to help run the family's estates in the Dutch East Indies. He moves from plantation to plantation, attempting to understand the ways of the local peoples, and their relationship to their land. On a visit to the capital, he falls in love with a teenage girl, Jenny Roosengaarde Bisschop, who he courts surreptitiously via his sister, with grave consequences for the reality of their relationships. Eventually they marry, and make a hard colonist-couple's life theirs, bear, lose and raise children, before Jenny on her visit to the home country discovers all the comforts of which she has been deprived in Java. Back at the plantation homestead, as the back-breaking work of establishing and maintaining business takes its toll on Rudolf, Jenny becomes estranged from him, and the bitter resentments of relatives eat at her until a terrible solution is achieved.

This book gives great insights into the mindset of the Dutch colonists in the East Indies. The book is based on private correspondence and documents from The Indies Tea and Family Archive and also from clearly substantial records from various family collections. Haasse, at the end: the material in the book is "not invented but chosen and arranged to meet the demands of the novel".

Every one of two years, I pick up a novel by Hella S. Haasse (1918-), the grand lady of Dutch literature. Haasse combines a nice style with a very sophisticated and utterly sympathetic posture.