Alfred van Cleef (b. 1954) is a writer and journalist who for many years worked for NRC Handelsblad, including a stint as correspondent during the wars in the Balkans. His previous books include the novel Longing (2002) and The Hidden Order. A journey of exploration along the prime meridian (2010), which was chosen as the best travel story of the year in the Netherlands and won the German ITB Book Award 2013 as an outstanding travel book.
(J.M. Meulenhoff, 1999, 240 pages)
‘Nowhere was the sea emptier, the waves higher, or the wind stronger. In this wild mass of water, equidistant from Sri Lanka, South Africa, Australia and Antarctica, was a minuscule volcanic peak, at least three thousand kilometers from the nearest continent. I was no longer in doubt. I had fallen under the spell of the most outcast, most middle-of-nowhere island on earth: Amsterdam.’
(Cossee, 2002, 237 pages)
Longing, Alfred van Cleef’s first novel, tells the story of investigative journalist Albert Ossedrijver and his exciting search into the past of his family, who were killed in World War II. His quest leads him to another family, his girlfriend Esther’s family, members of whom had been in the Dutch pro-Nazi NSB party. Without either one of them knowing it, it turns out that both families were marked by the past: Albert’s grandfather was betrayed to the Nazis; Esther’s grandfather was a traitor.
(Cossee, 2010, 397 pages)
An invisible line runs from the North Pole to the South Pole over mountaintops, through living rooms, restaurants and industrial estates, across villages and towns, seas and rivers. This line was adopted internationally as the prime meridian at a conference in Washington in 1884. Alfred van Cleef has been fascinated since childhood by maps, globes and society’s outer edges, and he decided to travel the line overland, from the rainy English village of Tunstall – slowly crumbling into the sea – to the Ghanaian port of Tema.
(Cossee, 2014, 336 pages)
‘A scenery of destruction and human failing’, writes Alfred van Cleef about Republika Srpska, one of the two political entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina following the war in former Yugoslavia. For some twenty years the author was close to a Bosnian family from that region, and in Lost World he records their trials and tribulations.
