(Leopold, 1999, 104 pages)

Willis has an active brain and a fertile imagination. He’s the kind of kid who is so ordinary on the outside that other people have no idea how exceptional he is on the inside. Especially his parents. At the moment they are not taking much notice of Willis, because they are grieving over the loss of a premature baby. Willis is jealous of that ‘failed baby brother’ who, ‘by not being there, manages to be the centre of attention’.

(Leopold, 2002, 87 pages)

Godje features a fascinating main character with a complex personality: the highly imaginative tearaway, Robbie Nathan, who likes to boss people around. He tells the reader all about what happens one summer when he doesn’t go away on holiday.

(Querido Kind, 2004, 108 pages)

Something very striking about Daan Remmerts de Vries’ De Noordenwindheks (‘The Witch of the North Wind’) is that if you turn it over you will see that it has two front covers. This is one book containing two interlinked novellas: one about eleven year-old Mori Brunèl and the other about Rifka Verdigaal who is the same age. It is up to the reader to decide which story to begin with.

(Lemniscaat, 2006, 93 pages)

De diepte van een Zweeds meer (Deep as a Swedish Lake) is one of those strange stories that you slip into as a reader, as though you were playing a part in it. On the very first page, Hesther, the main character, asks what you’re expecting from the story and involves you in her thoughts. She tells you all about the summer holiday she spent in Sweden with her friend Mo and Mo’s parents.

(Querido Kind, 2008, 26 pages)

Multi-talented, award-winning author and illustrator Daan Remmerts de Vries delighted his readers last year with this picture book about love and about dreams that come true. Owl falls asleep and has a dream about a white rabbit. The reader wonders whether Owl fancies leg of rabbit for his dinner, but this suspicion turns out to be wrong – Owl is, in fact, a very noble creature.

(Leopold, 2010, 32 pages)

A little blue horse prances right out of a painting. It gallops through the air, heading for a photograph of its creator: Wassily Kandinsky. Another version of the artist himself is sitting there on a stool in front of his easel, watching the little blue horse.

(Querido Kind, 2013, 204 pages)

We have arrived at a point where divorce is no longer a taboo in Dutch children’s literature. Usually such books are about the child, who is angry at first, but who gradually becomes used to the situation. The guilty parents do their best and everything works out okay. But what happens when that’s not the case? What about if your dad gets a new girlfriend really quickly, and your mum starts acting more and more strangely, and no one seems to be worried about you?

(Querido, 2015, 183 pages)

In this story, told through the voice of twelve-year-old Elmer Noorland, Daan Remmerts de Vries presents an incredibly strong psychological portrait of a troubled young man. Rarely has such a realistic, intriguing and unforgettable character as this Elmer appeared in a children’s book. Remmerts de Vries shows a deft touch, maintaining a light tone in his diary story, with its awkward, boyish style, while making a sincere, heartrending plea for individuality and freedom.

(Hoogland & Van Klaveren, 2015, 36 pages)

In sparkling prose with a generous helping of humor Remmerts de Vries breathed new life into the old stories in The Adventures of Odysseus. In his work, the Greek heroes don’t battle the outside world – the real struggle is within themselves. His heroes are bodybuilder types. But at the same time he makes clear that fighting lions, centaurs or seven-headed monsters isn’t the real challenge they are up against. Heracles’ real battle, for example, the thing that took all of his strength, ‘was keeping himself in check’.

(Gottmer, 2017, 48 pages)

Multiple Gouden Griffel winner Daan Remmerts de Vries has written a humorous story about a monster who doesn’t seem too bad at first, but turns out to be just a mean old cyclops in the end. He rewards the helpful locals who give him an eyeglass for his short-sighted eye by flattening their village.

(Gottmer, 2019, 40 pages)

In this book, Daan Remmerts de Vries plays a beautifully ironic, ambiguous game with the sly and cunning character traditionally attributed to the fox. This irony can be seen mainly in the interaction between the words and the pictures.

(Volt, 2020, 224 pages)

Mowgli is part of a series of legendary characters that many people know and love. The man cub dressed in a red loincloth is an icon. He ultimately owes his immortality to the sense of adventure and the imaginative language of Rudyard Kipling, as seen once again in this beautiful new adaptation of The Jungle Book (1894).