(Lemniscaat, 2000, 191 pages)

The mid-nineteenth century was peak time for the coal mines of Limburg in the southern Netherlands. Child labour was normal, compulsory education non-existent and the population was under the thumb of the Roman Catholic church, the large landowners, and industrial bosses. Against this bleak background Van der Vlugt describes the hopeless existence of a mining family. The reader sees all this through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Emma: hunger, cold, inadequate housing, parents worn-out by adversity, tiny children who crawl through the tunnels with baskets of coal on their backs, the fear of collapse, mining gas and brown disease, grief at the loss of loved ones killed in one of the many…

(Lemniscaat, 2005, 96 pages)

Rufus, a writer, is recruited against his will as a scout in the army of Julius Caesar in the first century BC. The Roman army has been ordered to conquer the Germanic tribes. On a scouting expedition Rufus is taken prisoner by the Germans, but because Rufus once had a German slave who taught him the language and customs of his people, he eventually comes to occupy a very different position in the tribe.