Nella, it soon becomes apparent, has a sensibility more akin to that of a 21st-century teenager than a 17th-century one: outspoken, determined, reflexively feminist. How does the miniaturist she commissions to make, among other things, a tiny lute for her cabinet, know so much about her and the other members of the Brandt household? And what are the secrets that Johannes and Marin are trying so hard to keep? Luckily, our heroine is not at all the timorous type she seemed at first to be, and she takes the ensuing revelations – they come thick and fast, in the manner of biblical thunderbolts – if not exactly on the chin, then with a great deal more aplomb than you might expect.

What follows for Nella is a series of puzzles. Not exactly a fun town for a marzipan lover with a cabinet house in need of tiny new inhabitants. Thanks to its Calvinist burgomasters, the people of Amsterdam eat their sugar in secret, and are forbidden to own dolls or any other replicas of the human form. Lonely, she longs for the company of her parakeet, Peebo, but he has been confined by Marin to the kitchen, the sudden absence of his bright feathers symbolising the puritan repression at work in the wider city. Johannes does not come to her at night, and his wedding gift is a cabinet house – an exquisitely diminutive replica of his own property – which he now invites Nella to fill with miniature furniture at his expense.

The marriage is more arrangement than love match, and for Nella, a country girl, Johannes and his household are an alarming prospect: his waspish sister, Marin, terrifies her half to death, and she finds it hard to lift her eyes from the startling sight of his manservant, Otto, a former slave.

I t is 1686, and in Amsterdam, 18-year-old Nella Oortman arrives at the grand house of her new husband, the wealthy merchant Johannes Brandt.

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