You will feel the specific gravity of a family ritual that is obviously ridiculous and quietly load-bearing — and recognize your own family's version before chapter three.
The Provenance Novels · Cover revealed
House Rules
The game has been paused since 1987. Nobody wants to win it. Everybody needs it not to end.
Gree Dijkstra dies halfway through a turn in the homemade game that has kept her family returning for forty years.
The story
What waits inside
The first rule is clear: the game may pause, but it may never end.
So Loes returns to her mother's table, where the family gathers around the board exactly as Gree left it. Her scattered siblings take their old seats. The scorebook is open, and nobody agrees whose move comes next.
What begins as obedience becomes a campaign of loopholes, alliances, stale grievances, and fiercely polite rule disputes. Every square carries a family story. Every turn asks whether ritual can hold people together after the person who made it is gone.
Then Loes finds an old notebook that explains why Gree made her Keeper, and the unread final page becomes impossible to avoid.
To finish the game, the family must decide which rules protected their love, which merely postponed the truth, and whether ending a tradition can be another way of keeping faith with it.
A warm, sharply observed family novel about grief, gamesmanship, and the rules we inherit without choosing.
None — fully realist: one Dutch family, one invented board game ("Grootmoeders Spel"), one handwritten rulebook amended annually for forty years, and a matriarch's turn left forever unfinished on the dining-room table.
A family is a group of people who keep showing up to something none of them can explain. The excuse matters exactly because it is an excuse — and the people who build the excuses are doing the least visible, most essential work.
Interior previews
First pages arriving soon
When manuscript pages are ready, they will appear here as a lightweight gallery — designed for fast loading, sharp type, and quiet immersion.