(De Bezige Bij, 1951, 304 pages)

On publication of his debut novel Archibald Strohalm in 1951, Harry Mulisch was immediately recognized as a great literary talent and a new voice in post-war Dutch literature. This highly imaginative story with its bizarre characters set the tone for Mulisch’s extraordinary career as an author. He distinguished himself in the midst of the prevailing literary realism by his abstract-realist style, which clearly had the capacity to speak to an international readership.

(De Bezige Bij, 1959, 174 pages)

Harry Mulisch is a philosophical author who does not shun the great issues of life. This is evident in his magnum opus De ontdekking van de hemel (The Discovery of Heaven, 1992), which centres on the ungodliness of the world due to progressive technology, and the disastrous consequences for humanity. Although his basic premise is pessimistic, Mulisch offers a way out: for those who perceive the world as essentially in harmony, and who prefer the freedom of art to the yoke of technology, there is still hope.

(De Bezige Bij, 1962, 194 pages)

In her preface to Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Hannah Arendt tells us that the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch is one of the few to have shared her views of the character of Adolf Eichmann, the organiser of the Holocaust. In 1961, Mulisch went to Jerusalem to report on the Eichmann trial for a Dutch weekly. His articles were collected a year later and published as De zaak 40/61.

(De Bezige Bij, 1975, 160 pages)

In 1975 Harry Mulisch published a novel that stunned the critics with the simplicity of its storyline and the unexpected theme of lesbian love, which until then had been almost exclusively the domain of female writers. But Twee vrouwen is above all a psychological novel.

(De Bezige Bij, 1982, 254 pages)

As the only child of a Jewish mother and an Austrian banker who worked with the Nazis, Harry Mulisch brought together two moral extremes in his biography. It is no coincidence that the war features in his work time and again. De Aanslag (The Assault), published in 1982, is his most successful war novel. This book is a thriller and a moral-philosophical novel in one.

(De Bezige Bij, 1989, 77 pages)

In Voorval an engineer of a skyscraper still being built says to a colleague: ‘I’m going out for a bit of fresh air’ taking the elevator to the 55th floor as he does so. A sudden gust of wind knocks him from the scaffolding. The engineer is not scared: ‘as long as you’re not dead, you’re alive’ and especially ‘he who falls, is free’.

(De Bezige Bij, 1992, 901 pages)

De ontdekking van de hemel is Harry Mulisch’s magnum opus. All the paths he has taken in his previous work come together in this 900-page novel. The book has 65 chapters, one for each of Mulisch’s years at the time of the novel’s publication. Mulisch, with his hang for numerological symbolism, has given a first hint of the book’s autobiographical nature. In the two main characters, Max Delius and Onno Quist, the reader can recognise much of Mulisch and his deceased friend, the chess player, Jan Hein Donner.

(De Bezige Bij, 1998, 304 pages)

Anyone who reads Harry Mulisch must have a penchant for deciphering codes, tracking down clues, and unravelling enigmas. In the very first paragraph the reader is warned that if he’s sitting back expecting instant entertainment, he would do better to lay the book aside. This warning will not daunt the true reader who will be rewarded, for as always Mulisch’s literary alchemy retains its fascination right to the last page. Ancient myths, historical fact, literary heroes, and biological and chemical discoveries are the components of a compelling plot; they are combined and interlinked to form a new entity, a new creation.

(De Bezige Bij, 2000, 213 pages)

Harry Mulisch has written his best works late in life. At the age of 65 he completed De ontdekking van de hemel, the Faust-sized novel in which he intertwines all his themes with an astonishing dexterity. After discovering heaven, Mulisch found a formula that summarised and explained the universe, on which theme he wrote the novel De procedure. In Siegfried, Mulisch harks back to World War II, the period that plays a central role in his works.