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Jutta Chorus

A female line is repeatedly concealed behind different surnames and is therefore less visible, realizes Jutta Chorus when she stumbles upon these astonishing women who were all related. An elderly family friend, Lili Veenman, shares a suitcase filled with letters, diaries and photographs, when Chorus shows interest in her forebears. ‘I know nothing of the lives of these women,’ Chorus writes, ‘because they never became famous. Leafing through the documents, I don’t think: how did their lives unfold, but how will their lives unfold? They lived in the shadow of history.’ The matriarch of this story is German-born Alma Bimmerman (1853-1948), an independent woman, educated in the Netherlands. A teacher, she left for Batavia to marry her fiancé, who died just before she arrived. She pioneered as a woman alone and later married a forester who considered women to be equals. In addition to raising her four children, she wrote several novels. The first child born in this egalitarian marriage was Elly Berkhout (1882-1943) whose life began promisingly: she was the first woman to graduate from the Agricultural School in Wageningen. But she abandoned her job as an agricultural researcher to marry a philandering man in the East Indies. The third generation of women in the book are granddaughters Sylvia (1907-1994) and Elly Brandts Buys (1913-1985). The oldest, the unruly Sylvia, became editor-in-chief of the weekly Haagse Post and developed a new journalistic style. Her relationships with men were troubled. Sylvia’s younger sister Elly had a very different life. She travelled all over Europe, settled in Rome, was well-liked as a fashion model and photographer. Although she married, she remained childless. Finally, Chorus tells the story of Lili Veenman (b. 1930), Sylvia’s only daughter, who trained in Paris and was the first female film director in Rome. In 1960, she married film director Fons Rademakers, and remained in his shadow, working on his sets as an assistant.Alma’s Daughters is a rich book, written in an engaging style, that provides food for thought on gender inequality and the course of history.

Five women, five lives in shadows. A haunting, breathtaking ramble through the generations, This is another way of writing history

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Non-Fiction

The untold ‘herstories’ of a family of talented women

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Assets

Almas dochters. Vijf levens in de schaduw

In this innovative multi-biography, Jutta Chorus follows a fascinating female family line over the course of the past century and a half. The book begins in the nineteenth century with matriarch Alma and then follows the lives of Alma’s daughter Elly, her granddaughters Sylvia and Elly, and her great-granddaughter Lili. A writer, an agricultural scientist, a journalist, a photographer and a filmmaker. Had they been men, the biographer argues, they would have displayed their talents with more bravado and most likely gone down in history.

Alma's Daughters - Five Lives in the Shadowsd

Sinan Çankaya

According to Çankaya, he touched on what may be the last Western taboo: the Holocaust and how that suffering has been turned into a political tool. As a writer from a Muslim background, his position was even more thorny. Discomfort around the subject wasn’t just limited to his dealings with the publisher, it also played out in talk shows, at university, and in journalism. And on top of it all, due to his ethnicity, he wasn’t ‘allowed’ to be angry. In the end, Çankaya decided to comply with his editor’s wishes, but in doing so he made use of his own back story to map out his disillusionment with the system.  Çankaya explores the mechanisms that bar him from writing about the Palestinian genocide. He explores the links between anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and World War II, and the colonial roots of Zionism. The crux, as he sees it, is that the suffering of the Holocaust is being turned into a political tool, not out of empathy for Jewish victims but because Western complicity during the war still weighs heavily on the conscience. Echoes of History is an intelligent account of adaptation and integration, code switching and class betrayal. It is about not being able to escape an immigrant legacy and remaining an outsider in the literary and academic worlds. But above all, it about which deaths we remember, and which stories we bury.<ul><li>Bestselling title: 25,000 copies sold</li><li>Hard-hitting topic: what it means for a person of colour to navigate white institutions. Includes a behind-the-scenes account of a fraught editorial process.</li><li>Examines the Jewish memorial culture from an culturally Islamic perspective</li></ul>

Çankaya is known for his sharp, critical contributions to debates around racism, identity and integration.

Sinan Çankaya exposes a history of hypocrisy.

<ul><li>Bestselling title: 25,000 copies sold</li><li>Hard-hitting topic: what it means for a person of colour to navigate white institutions. Includes a behind-the-scenes account of a fraught editorial process.</li><li>Examines the Jewish memorial culture from an culturally Islamic perspective</li></ul>

A thought-provoking essay on who is allowed to speak and who is silenced

Marijke Nagtegaal

Galmende Geschiedenissen

Çankaya’s bestselling book begins with an awkward conversation with his publisher, De Bezige Bij. A successful media figure and university lecturer, he was commissioned to write about transcending his immigrant background. But driven by anger over the genocide in Gaza, he penned an indictment of Western support for Israel instead. This didn’t go down so well.

Echoes of History

Eva Meijer

Mice are highly social animals and have an extensive language, which makes use of sound, posture, gestures and scent. They have habits and even make plans. Meijer was struck by how well they take care of each other, especially when one is sick. This care continues after death. The mice greet and wash the body of their dead friends and bury them under a pile of papers or nesting material. Science, on the other hand, considers mice convenient experiment material: sexually mature at ten weeks and able to birth offspring in just nineteen days.Many scientific articles have been written about lab mice, but they are rarely actually about the mice themselves. They describe what the research teaches us about human diseases, human emotions, human neurology and other human matters. Our propensity for anthropocentric thought places humans at the centre of society, marginalizing other creatures, organisms and things. Meijer argues, however on the basis of her study, that we need to move towards a different political system based on justice and freedom in order to co-exist with human and non-human beings.  <ul><li>By an acclaimed animal rights philosopher who has already been translated into 20 languages</li><li>Winner of the 2025 Nature Book Prize</li><li>Compact at just 160 pages</li><li>Includes charming pictures of the mice taken by the author, illustrations and verses</li></ul>

The Life of Mice describes beautifully the social behaviour of the mice Eva Meijer shared her home with (…) and provides a good introduction to decentring humans in our way of thinking, as well as the philosophy of animal rights. […] A book truly worth reading with the same open mind and curiosity that Meijer has towards the mice.

The Life of Mice is a revelation! Eva Meijer raises serious questions about the animal testing industry.

How living with rescue mice leads to a broader ethical enquiry into animal rights

Stella Rieck

Muizenleven

In 2020, Eva Meijer started adopting laboratory mice from Utrecht University via a rodent rescue project. For three years, the writer took care of twenty-five mice at home while convalescing from Long Covid. Observing the way they clean each other, compulsively tidy up, run in the wheel, make escape attempts, and approach nest-building as a quasi-artform, Meijer came to know them as fully-fledged individuals with their own personalities. Soon Flankie, Bram, Wezel, Bullie and companions were making a deep impact on their human observer.

The Life of Mice

Jacqueline Klooster

Why is this and why is it happening now? And what can we learn from it about antiquity and ourselves? As she explores various mythological characters and their modern transformations, Jacqueline Klooster invites readers to look into an often surprising mirror. Besides reflections on different ways of retelling and the motives of the revisionists, she places the new stories in context, and compares and contrasts them with earlier adaptations and with the originals themselves, revealing her personal fascinations along the way.Helen, Medusa, Antigone, Medea, Persephone are treated, but also male figures such as Achilles and Apollo. Klooster examines works by well-known literary authors like Toni Morrison, Marguerite Yourcenar and Margaret Atwood, but also more popular books (think Fifty Shades of Grey and the Percy Jackson series), Tiktok trends (Medusa tattoos) and films (Barbie, Gone Girl, Troy). ‘Reading is rewriting,’ she claims. ‘Every story potentially contains gaps, questions, perspectives that remain undeveloped, invitations to think, feel and invent further.’ This essential guide decodes why Medusa has become a #MeToo icon and Persephone a romance heroine – and what it means for literature and society.<ul><li>Revisionist retellings of classical myths are a strong trend in books, films/series and musicals. On fan fiction sites like Archive of our own thousands of fan writers lend classical figures new guises and create new plots</li><li>The definitive analysis of one of culture’s hottest trends: why classical myths are being rewritten by and for women, and how these stories reveal our deepest contemporary anxieties about power, identity, and voice.</li><li>A blend of scholarly expertise with accessible, personal writing, for fans of Nathalie Haynes, Stephen Fry and Hadestown.</li></ul>

‘It is truly impressive how many new, predominantly female, often rebellious variations on classical themes Klooster has collected and analyses.’

‘The book is cleverly written and interesting for many since it’s not at all pedantic, while there is something to be learned by everyone. […] After reading Medusa in the Mirror, you’ll have a whole list of novels and classic texts you want to read.’

A scintillating exploration of mythological figures and their modern reinventions

Martijn Prins

Medusa in de spiegel: Wat mythen ons vertellen over wie we zijn

Myths are purportedly timeless; they contain universal meanings, which is one of the reasons they still appeal to us. But the opposite is also true: myths are extremely time-bound. Any storyteller can appropriate them and adapt them for their own purposes. In recent years, there has been a huge turnaround in how mythical figures are presented: popular films and novels about them are everywhere. Feminist retellings, created as a counterculture phenomenon, are so successful that they’ve almost become a cliché.

Medusa in the Mirror: What Myths Tell Us About Who We Are

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