(De Arbeiderspers, 2001)

In Tweeduister (Smokefall, 2001), Hermsen’s second novel, the author pictures the lives of a group of English and American artists - T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Marlow Moss and Djuna Barnes - during the turbulent years of the Interbellum, the period between the two World Wars.

(De Arbeiderspers, 2008, 256 pages)

In this ingenious epistolary-cum-historical novel, Hermsen shines a fascinating light on the life and work of Isabella Tuyll de Charrière, better known by her pseudonym: Belle van Zuylen. She begins a personal investigation in the spirit of the eighteenth-century Dutch libertine author and composer into the moral aspects of marriage and love, then and now. From the very first page she draws the reader intimately into Van Zuylen’s mind, fluidly alternating letters, journal entries, and fragments of narrative, all relating to the events of a single summer in 1785.

(De Arbeiderspers, 2009, 272 pages)

The clock was originally meant to help us organize work, transport and trade. ‘By far the most artificial of all our inventions,’ W.G. Sebald called it. Nowadays it rules our entire lives and this book is a fervent plea to free ourselves from the dictatorship of the clock and find a new balance, to go back to doing nothing, to embrace boredom and repose.

(De Arbeiderspers, 2017, 155 pages)

Philosopher J.J. Hermsen traces how we have dealt with melancholy down the ages, referring to philosophy, literature and art. Her lively, erudite cultural and historical essay takes us from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, through its reassessments in art and thinking, to the present day.