(De Bezige Bij, 2010, 382 pages)

The central character in Jessica Durlacher’s novel The Hero is Sara Silverstein, married with two children and a journalist by profession. When Sara’s father dies, several apparently inexplicable, catastrophic events follow. It then emerges that all the misfortune originates from a single source, the Second World War, when as a young boy Sara’s father lost his parents in the camps and was left to survive on his own. Later Sara’s family meets Raaijmakers, descendant to the traitor of those years. Will either party succeed in breaking loose from the monstrous past?

(De Arbeiderspers, 2021, 432 pages)

As with Durlacher’s previous novels, The Voice is about violence encroaching upon ordinary lives and the question of how to be a good and just person. Psychoanalyst Zelda looks back on her past, when she made a home with her husband Bor Wagschal and their patchwork family of three children. As second-generation Holocaust survivors, they are aware that the battle for freedom is never really over. Their friendship with a threatened anti-Islam activist begins to put this moral principle under strain and will ultimately destroy the family.