Review: "The Camino" by Anya Niewierra

The Camino by Anya Niewierra
Translated from the Dutch by Eileen Stevens
Published August 2026 via Simon & Schuster
★★★

A year ago, Lotte's husband died violently on the Camino; now, she's walking his same route in his memory, trying to understand what drove him to end it all.

I'll very happily read most things about the Camino, even more than a decade after I walked it myself (on different routes than Lotte), and it's been a delight to see a bit more fiction coming through about the experience. For a while it was mostly memoir and the occasional nonfiction treatise, and I love both of those things, but I also love variety. The Camino is billed as a thriller, although I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. The plot hinges on a complicated backstory, some of what Lotte learns as she goes and some of which we get through letters throughout the book: Her husband, whom she knew to have been a refugee following the Bosnian genocide (she's never known details), was living under a false name, and—given the awful way that he died—Lotte is desperate to know whether his past contributed to his suicide. So that's one part of the mystery, but the other part is in the...accidents...that keep happening around Lotte.

The parts about the Bosnian genocide are complicated and (I overuse this word, but it's accurate) fascinating. They're also hard to read in places; the book doesn't shy away from the horrors of neighbors turning against neighbors, of nationalism turned violent, of not knowing who you can trust or where is safe to be. There's a lot the reader (to say nothing of Lotte) doesn't fully understand until close to the end, including who held what perspectives and roles during the genocide; there's also some really interesting discussion about what all of this means for the present day, and whether it's possible to truly reinvent onself.

Lotte, though, I struggled with. I didn't really need all the attempts on her life (I lost count of how many there were, but suffice it to say that the attempts are pretty well constant); I think the historical mystery was enough mystery for me, and I could have done without the constant murder attempts (none of which Lotte understands as anything other than coincidence until very close to the end). Lotte thinks she's pretty aware of her surroundings, but it takes her quite a long time to put together the pieces, and when she starts deciding who to trust based largely on hormones, I started thinking she was a bit TSTL (too busy telling people she's a chocolatier to focus on possible consequences?). The number of men falling in love or in lust with her also stretched the bounds of my imagination, and by the end of the book I think I was just a little over Lotte.

So a mixed bag. For the Bosnia material alone, this would be four stars, but mixed with other things it ended up somewhat lower for me. Your mileage may vary, especially if you read it in the original Dutch or in a different translation—always hard to know how much that might impact the experience.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.