While a group of neo-Nazis are preparing an anniversary bash of disastrous proportions, an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe, and, in a room at Le Charit?, a Holocaust survivor tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Who is that talking cat, why do ghosts of SS soldiers roam the city, and what is Speer's favorite actress up to?

    Stories he’d heard as a child had led Hertmans to suspect that their contents might be disturbing, and for years he didn’t dare to open them.When he finally did, he discovered unexpected secrets. His grandfather’s life was marked by years of childhood poverty in late-nineteenth-century Belgium, by horrific experiences on the frontlines during the First World War and by the loss of the young love of his life. He sublimated his grief in the silence of painting.Drawing on these diary entries, his childhood memories and the stories told within Urbain’s paintings, Hertmans has produced a poetic novelisation of his grandfather’s story, brought to life with great imaginative power and vivid detail.War and Turpentine is an enthralling search for a life that coincided with the tragedy of a century—and a posthumous, almost mythical attempt to give that life a voice at last.

    It is generally regarded as the masterpiece of Conscience, which earned him the title "the man who taught his people to read".

    His grandmother guards the family dead with fierce determination, arranging and re-arranging their photographs in a special cabinet, talking to them and arguing with them. The cabinet is an extension of heaven, with its own purgatory and hell: their place in his grandmother's favour is marked by their proximity to a statue of the Blessed Virgin. But, one image is always next to the Virgin: Marcel, who died young, far away and for whom there is no grave. How did he die? His laughing eyes, staring out from a face already obliterated by the sun, give nothing away. Only when the boy uncovers letters that hint at a hidden past, does he decide to learn who Marcel was, and why the circumstances of his death remain so painful.

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    "When I was in the camp," her father's stories always begin. Although she lives in the everyday world of school and friends, a daughter is compelled by love to enter her father's harrowing world of hunger, death, and survival in the concentration camp. In a moving Afterword, the author sets the historical context for the novel and speaks directly about her own father, upon whom the novel is based. "An extraordinary novel written with passion, lucidity, and restraint" (The Forward).

    During a night spent at work, he witnesses something that he should never have seen. Michael has to flee to try and escape a powerful system behind the operation in which he accidentally gets trapped. But with every step he takes, he is followed by the mysterious Mr. Miller, who seems to know almost everything about him. In a sparkling and exhilarating fast paced style, den Tex creates a scarily timely universe ruled by espionage-like computer techniques, full of managers, mergers, and opaque negotiations, and with that a new genre: the corporate thriller.

    Amsterdam is a city at the peak of its powers: science and art are flourishing in the Golden Age and Dutch ships bring back exotic riches from the Far East. Madam Van Nulandt passes her time taking expensive painting lessons from a local master, Rembrandt van Rigin, and when Catrin takes up a brush to finish some of her mistress's work, Rembrandt realizes the maid has genuine talent and encourages her to continue.When a figure from her past threatens her new life, Catrin flees to the smaller city of Delft. There, her gift as a painter earns her a chance to earn a living painting pottery at a local workshop. Slowly, the workshop begins to develop a new type of pottery to rival fancy blue-on-white imported Chinese porcelain—and the graceful and coveted Delft Blue designs she creates help revolutionize the industry. But when tragedy strikes, Catrin must decide whether to defend her newfound independence or return to the village that she'd fled.

    Van der Jagt introduces a host of unforgettable characters and weaves a web of shameful secrets in this novel that uses Vienna the way Kafka used Prague—as the (strangely familiar) landscape where the narrator’s obsessions are given free rein. “Van der Jagt’s dysfunctional family may be the most wondrous and most marvelously entertaining in recent memory. . . . He looses the spirit of J.P. Donleavy—and more—once again upon the world. Wonderful.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review“Marek’s voice . . . is what gives his romantic misadventures (first kiss, deflowering, anxiety about physical endowment) their fun air of droll farce.”—Entertainment Weekly“Dark, funny and penetrating.”—The New York Observer“Archly tongue in cheek.”—Publishers Weekly“This whimsical novel, written pseudonymously by a Dutch novelist, masquerades as the confessions of an Austrian philosophy student . . . [who] decides to assert his existence by pursuing l’amour fou.”—The New Yorker

    Sepha is a girl on the run, going from one place to another in hiding with other Jews, helped by members of the Dutch resistance. When the Liberation comes, while it rids the country of Nazi tyranny, it does not rescue Sepha and her circle from their most personal strains and stresses.

    Tropical fish swimming in the canals. The magic of Mrs. Van Amersfoort, the Beethoven-loving witch next door. The fierce beauty of Eliza with her artificial leg. And the Lord Jesus, who tells him, "Just call me Jesus." Thomas records these visions in his "Book of Everything." They comfort him when his father beats him, when the angels weep for his mother's black eyes. And they give him the strength to finally confront his father and become what he wants to be when he grows up: "Happy."

    In the Netherlands, the novel has been described as "a cross between Jorge Luis Borges's mystical labyrinth and William Gibson's futuristic sprawl" ("The Rights Report"). As the novel opens, Prometheus abandons a mythical, primeval world ruled by violence for a cold, earthly city that is perpetually in renewal--a caricature of the city in which we live. Once descended, Ulrike, an orphaned girl whose body produces music, guides Prometheus though the slums of the city. Prometheus finds himself in a counterculture of squatters, junkies, and storytelling whores--called tonguecats. The fire of resistance is smoldering all through the city; although the court continues to function, opposition to the monarchy mounts, and the king leaves his palace in search of human warmth. Peter Verhelst's story, together with the city, bursts apart at the seams. Tonguecat is a visionary novel--and a tour de force of imaginative and surreal writing.

    Geert Mak crisscrosses Europe from Verdun to Berlin, SaintPetersburg to Srebrenica in search of evidence and witnesses of the last hundred years of Europe. Using his skills as an acclaimed journalist, Mak locates the smaller, personal stories within the epic arc ofhistory-talking to a former ticket-taker at the gates of the Birkenau concentration camp or noting the neat rows of tiny shoes in the abandoned nursery school in the shadow of Chernobyl. His unique approach makes thereader an eyewitness to a half-forgotten past, full of unknown peculiarities, sudden insights and touching encounters. Sweeping in scale, but intimate in detail "In Europe" is amasterpiece. "From the Trade Paperback edition."

    Alice and Mattia, both "primes," are misfits who seem destined to be alone. Haunted by childhood tragedies that mark their lives, they cannot reach out to anyone else. When Alice and Mattia meet as teenagers, they recognize in each other a kindred, damaged spirit. But the mathematically gifted Mattia accepts a research position that takes him thousands of miles away, and the two are forced to separate. Then a chance occurrence reunites them and forces a lifetime of concealed emotion to the surface. Like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, this is a stunning meditation on loneliness, love, and the weight of childhood experience that is set to become a universal classic.

    When an imported rabbit introduces the plague the population is annihilated, all except a few villagers and the odd pig. By the author of Bathsheba and The Way of the Serpent.