8/16 @7:00pm - Bette Adriaanse

Bette Adriaanse is a writer and a visual artist. Her first novel, Rus Like Everyone Else, was published by Unnamed Press in 2015. Bette also teaches writing at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy in Amsterdam and she is the co-founder of the global Heroines! Movement.

What's Mine:

354 Rooseveltlaan, Amsterdam.

It's Saturday and Luis Sol is hauling his brand-new smart fridge up the stairs. Luis is a visual person and so he fills his apartment with beautiful things: glass tables, marble countertops, white couches, workout equipment. He can afford to on his meager Bagel Shop salary thanks to inheriting his mother's city apartment. This is his home.

Professor William Rose is an Oxford intellectual. He's visiting Amsterdam to find out where he came from thanks to a letter which may prove Edward Hond, the renowned philanthropist, is his biological father. When he arrives, William stares up into the lit windows of his father's apartment to see Luis. For all intents and purposes, that apartment belongs to William, it's where he was born, it's his rightful inheritance, and he's going to take it back.

What ensues is Bette Adriaanse's enchanting tale of two men who refuse to share and fight for what they each believe to be true, only to destroy what they each held to so dear to begin with. Written in Dutch and English simultaneously, What's Mine is as humorous about lawyers and the futility of paperwork as it is heartbreakingly true to the financial realities of our convoluted modern world. What Adriaanse presents is a question we can all ask ourselves: Can what's mine be yours too?