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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

Book

Non-Fiction

The untold ‘herstories’ of a family of talented women

Asset

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

Olivier van Beemen

With this book, Olivier van Beemen has delivered a clever piece of investigative journalism by taking on a rich, neocolonial company that unscrupulously extends its power through nature reserves in Africa. (...) Despite active and even intimidating opposition, he kept his course. The result is a thorough and at the same time excitingly constructed investigative story. Olivier van Beemen has amply succeeded in unlocking a shady world for a wide audience. A classic journalistic tour de force.

An important book. Van Beemen presents the results of his painstaking research in the form of a well-told page-turner about the ugly side of nature conservation by military means.

Anyone who likes crime novels will love this book, because this elaborate investigative research reads like a very exciting business thriller with the essential difference that this story about this NGO operating in Africa is true …

The dispiriting story of a club of white benefactors in Africa: how nature parks have been corralled by modern imperialism

Lotte de Boer

Ondernemers in het wild

African Parks is considered a great success story in conservation. The organisation, founded by Paul Fentener van Vlissingen and supported by the Dutch National Postcode Lottery, has taken over full authority from the state in more than twenty African nature reserves. It manages an area comparable to Britain, with support from western governments, the European Union and philanthropic billionaires. But all is not what it seems.

Entrepreneurs in the Wild

Christien Brinkgreve

In one of the most talked-about books of the year, a renowned sociologist and feminist, newly-widowed, painstakingly retraces her steps within her marriage. She considers gender patterns, her own role in her partial subjugation and the emotional challenges of parenthood. Revealing about the complexity of long-term heterosexual relationships, this is a brutally honest account that both stuns and moves the reader.<ul><li>65,000 copies sold in the Netherlands</li></ul>

A bestselling memoir about the space one occupies in society as a woman; about loneliness, fear and the choices we make in love.

Hayo Deinum

Beladen huis

Burdened House

Janna Coomans

The most commonly stolen items were humdrum: food or cooking pots, building materials, work equipment, clothing and coins. Hunger was a common motive. Houses were meagrely and functionally furnished without knickknacks, so a wool coat or a tin chamber pot was a prized possession. The heavy punishments for theft which included beheading, hanging and being burned to death, show just how important household objects were at the time.Vignettes include a husband and wife stealing herrings from a barrel, a goldsmith seducing a miller’s wife with a stolen book, a medieval Bonnie &amp; Clyde gatecrashing a wedding, and a servant eating his stepfather’s sheep. The stories are colourful and entertaining. How would one even go about stealing a herd of pigs? Or some bees? The accounts give insights into different lifestyles, like that of a marauding serial murderer, a member of a robber’s gang marking doors with a secret code, or a man sleeping in barns who grew attached to a small black cow.  Coomans compares the old world she describes to life today and draws from it lessons on how we can better function as a society and rethink our relationship to material possessions.<ul><li>2025 Libris History Prize shortlist, 2025 Boekenbon Literary Prize longlist</li></ul><ul><li>Outstanding research is made tangible to the reader using details from well-known engravings and paintings from the period</li></ul><ul><li>Comparable to Emmanuel Le Roy’s Montaillou and Francis Pryor’s Britain in the Middle Ages</li></ul>

Those medieval folks weren’t actually that medieval: there was hardly any torture, beheadings or racks, as Janna Coomans demonstrates in Land of Thieves, penned with obvious pleasure.

Juicy and colourful […] The historian paints a vivid picture of the exploits of both small-time and major medieval crooks, thanks to excellent detective work in 500-600 year-old criminal registers, lists of court verdicts, and thieves’ confessions in real finds with titles like the liber filorium perdicionis – The Book of Lost Sons'

Brilliantly-researched, groundbreaking reconstruction of daily life in the fifteenth century

Marijke Nagtegaal

Dievenland

Drawing on newly-unearthed criminal registers, court records, and city archives, Coomans paints a vivid picture of the lives of commoners in the late Middle Ages. Her research is uniquely centred around thieves: 158 of them, arrested and tried between 1470 and 1510 in the Low Countries (present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg). Most of these criminals were men, only six were women, all of them confessed in surprising detail to their crimes.

Land of Thieves: Survival in the Middle Ages

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