(J.M. Meulenhoff, 1997, 291 pages)

Through eighty tightly-orchestrated scenes, we follow the life of a woman who, at the end of the book – when we have arrived in the present – is about forty-five and sits alone outside a café overlooking the beach near The Hague. Vera Melchers-Dornseiffer is a former Dutch teacher, a wife and a mother. Her whole life she has considered her aloofness to be the secret of her attractiveness.

(De Bezige Bij, 2005, 446 pages)

After writing for thirty years, Jan Siebelink is experiencing an unprecedented triumph with Knielen op een bed violen (Kneeling on a Bed of Violets). Since its publication this book has dominated the bestseller lists and has been awarded the AKO Literature Prize. According to a Flemish critic, Siebelink’s magnificent reaches the soul of ‘la Hollande profonde’.

(De Bezige Bij, 2008, 382 pages)

Just as in his best-selling Kneeling on a Bed of Violets, Jan Siebelink again returned to his rigidly devout youth in a village on the banks of the River IJssel, so in his new, voluminous novel Suezkade he revisits familiar territory. In the story of Marc Cordesius, a young French teacher at the Descartes College in The Hague, the reader will recognize many elements from his earlier novels and stories with a secondary school as their setting, which is hardly a surprise since the author taught French at the Marnix College in Ede for twenty-five years.

(De Bezige Bij, 2010, 272 pages)

In his latest novel, Het lichaam van Clara (Clara’s Body), Jan Siebelink returns to the enchanting, dark atmosphere of his 1975 debut Nachtschade (Nightshade). During his early career as a writer, Siebelink translated Huysmans’s A rebours and the ‘dazzling style, religious preoccupation and glorification of evil’ in this ‘bible of decadence’ made an overwhelming impression on him. Writing took hold of Siebelink – and that black romanticism has never left his work.