(Cossee, 2011, 285 pages)

There are talkers and silent types. But there are also fathers who are neither one nor the other. Paul Goldschmidt, a well-known speech therapist, is an expert at making contact with children who are unable speak. With them, he never has to discuss the war years, which are ever-present in the Amsterdam house where this willful, creative, and vain man lives with his family. A hero to his patients, he is unreachable and absent to his four children who ’have never experienced anything and should therefore be happy’.

(Cossee, 2012, 285 pages)

In her debut as a novelist, Saskia Gold­schmidt has chosen the true story of two brothers and a scientist who set up a pharmaceutical factory in the years running up to the Second World War. The author transforms this story into a tragedy of biblical proportions, with hormones flying all over the place.