(Leopold, 2002, 75 pages)

There are few children’s books in which the melancholy surrounding death is treated so gently, gracefully and lyrically as in Caesar and the Story Father. Caesar is an eight-year-old boy, who lives with his father, a hatter, on the edge of the woods, behind the dunes. His name is actually Arie, but because he was born by caesarean his parents called him Caesar. He likes to sit in his secret place in the dunes and call himself ‘emperor of the dunes’.

(Leopold, 2005, 120 pages)

There are very few writers who can create stories for young readers that add up to more than an accumulation of everyday events. Koos Meinderts is one of those writers. In his Keizer trilogy he tells the tale of the eight-year-old Keizer, who lives with his dad in a house by the sea.

(Lemniscaat, 2008, 80 pages)

“When it snows, Lucas, it means that the angels are moulting,” Lucas’s granddad once told him. Lucas remembers those words when he steps out into a world of whiteness on the final day of the year. On his long walk that morning, the memories come tumbling down through his mind like snowflakes. Lucas has a lot of things to remember – his dad, for example. When they had that sunny holiday on Terschelling, his dad was still around, but now he’s dead and buried. And eating cherries in the long grass with Isabel, the girl with the red hair. So many things that felt so good and carefree last summer are now over. Or was everything not quite as wonderful as Lucas would like to remember?…

(Lemniscaat, 2010, 32 pages)

Children’s writer Koos Meinderts began his career with cabaret songs and now, for the second time, he has turned one of those songs into a picture book. De man in de wolken (The Man in the Clouds) is a philosophical parable, with melancholy illustrations supplied by Annette Fienieg.

(Hoogland & Van Klaveren, 2016, 198 pages)

Naar het noorden (To the North) is set in the winter of 1944-1945, the winter of starvation, and the book makes an immediate impact. Not just because of what happens in the first two chapters – Jaap (almost 11) has a baby sister who lives for only a few minutes – but mainly because of the way Koos Meinderts writes about this family tragedy: in his subtle style and with precise observations.

(De Fontein, 2016, 160 pages)

Fifteen-year-old Kees promises his friend Jan that he’ll climb up a tall chimney with him so that they can see the sea from the top. But when it comes to it, he chickens out. Jan climbs up there on his own. “At the highest point he waved, triumphantly. He shouted something; I couldn’t hear what it was. ‘I can see the sea!’ – could it have been that? And then he fell and I ran home. Nothing happened, nothing happened.”

(Hoogland & Van Klaveren, 2019, 32 pages)

A man lives on a desert island, where one day he finds a map in a bottle with the words: ‘Find the treasure.’ He does not really want to leave his island, as he is having a fine time on his own. However, he builds a boat and sails away and meets the woman of his dreams, but still he keeps on looking for the treasure. He searches and searches — and eventually realizes that he has already found what he wants.