(Prometheus, 2007, 254 pages)

Thirty-year-old Theresa Pellikaan is typical of the wealthy middle classes - with her respectable background, successful husband and house in an apparently sleepy, yet powerful, rich village. ‘Money is what you have, it isn’t for talking about,’ she feels, and art is a spiritual occupation.

(Prometheus, 2013, 128 pages)

In the autumn of 2012, Maxim Februari, known until then as writer and philosopher Marjolijn Februari, announced his intention to live as a man. In The Making of a Man he describes how the news was greeted: the unease, the interest and the slightly too comradely tone in which people suddenly started to address him. Whatever the reaction, there was always an element of ignorance. Hardly anyone seemed to understand what a sex change actually involves or how best to react to it.

(Prometheus, 2017, 256 pages)

A great deal has been written about the ever more radical ways in which data shapes our lives. The tone is either optimistic and impressed or cynical doom-and-gloom. Maxim Februari, one of the Netherlands’ sharpest, most multifaceted thinkers, has turned his hand to the novel to explore at close quarters the influence of big data on a number of lives. The result is Lump.

(Prometheus, 2019, 297 pages)

Sharp, erudite, playful and funny: these are the words often used to describe the work by judicial philosopher Maxim Februari. He is without a doubt the most original essayist in the Dutch language. This year he was awarded the Netherlands’ greatest literary prize, the P.C. Hooft Prize. In this collection of lucid and thought-provoking meditations, Februari takes on big, contemporary questions such as digitalization, moral responsibility and the rule of law with subtle humor and musical prose.

(Prometheus, 2023, 144 pages)

In liberal democracies, human behaviour is regulated by the justice system. This way of establishing and maintaining norms is now being replaced with data-driven technologies in the rush to meet simultaneous crises. Written with erudition and wit, Give Us a Break, by judicial philosopher Maxim Februari, examines how this digitalization is rapidly transforming democracy, basic rights and the rule of law in practice.