Ibiza‘s Child

IBIZA, THE EIGHTIES. At the dawn of the techno and ecstasy era a lonely teenager sees her world going into a tailspin. Marianne, born on the island to a hippy mother and a drug dealing father, is trying to keep the pieces of her life together while one of her parents is in prison in England and the other is chasing her own dreams. When an officer from the notorious Guardia Civil offers her a ride and shelter, unexpectedly, Marianne's imagination takes over. Deeply fascinated by the officer she embarks on a vodka and XTC- fuelled journey, trying to build a bridge between two worlds that weren't meant to meet. With her father's villa on the verge of confiscation and her mother's rickety sense of reason plummeting to unmanageable depths, Marianne's fascination for the Guardia grows into a dangerous obsession. In a devastating haze of alcohol and drugs she might well be driving not only herself, but everyone close to her to the brink of destruction.

IBIZA'S CHILD is a novel about obsession - blinding, all-consuming obsession - and about a desperate search for parental love, a home, a fatherland. It is also a book about Ibiza: Ibiza as only one who was born on the island or has lived there for many years can know it. A genuine, bizarre, enigmatic, magnificent, deadly, never-to-be-encapsulated Ibiza.

ESTHER ENDING (1972) grew up on the island of Ibiza. She moved to the Netherlands permanently in 1994 and debuted in 2004 with the novel After Valentine, for which she received the prestigious Debut Prize. Her second novel Silent People came out in 2012.