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Forugh Karimi

But then she receives news of a girl who was like a sister to her back in Kabul, and the foundations of the life she’s carefully constructed crumble away. Widá can only see one way out: she has to fulfil an old promise and thus set the past right. Together with Margot, a journalist, she travels to Athens. Will she succeed in finishing that one story and forever laying it to rest?‘There was one story from back then that she’d let go of halfway through. And that trailing end had finally caught up with her. You can’t bury an unfinished story – as a psychiatrist she should have known that.&#039;The Afghan diaspora is compared to a bead necklace that has snapped: ‘The beads bounce all over the place and roll until, haphazardly, they land in some tiny crack and nestle there. Some beads keep on rolling, they never find a place to rest. We’re like that, beads scattered across the whole world, hoping that one day we’ll be strung together again.’In My Eyes I Carry Clouds jumps back and forth between present and past, alternating with diary fragments and letters, told from Widá’s perspective. The power of the storytelling, together with the deeply human narrative, forges a connection that goes beyond a mere understanding of the history of Afghanistan, war and migration.

Forugh Karimi touches the reader deeply with her new novel In My Eyes I Carry Clouds, about the lasting impact of trauma and human resilience.

Literature is a good way to bring Afghan history and the stories of refugees to life. Fiction goes beyond the bare facts, adding emotion, tension and a human perspective.

Book

A journey into the past, to seek closure and move on with life

Asset

Assets

Clara Rosell

In mijn ogen draag ik wolken

At some point in her life, Widá decided she would no longer allow herself to feel anything, she forced herself to have no emotions. It was a useful survival strategy when she had to flee Kabul as a fifteen-year-old and ended up in the Netherlands. She learnt Dutch, studied medicine and took up a career as a psychiatrist.

In My Eyes I Carry Clouds

Annemieke Dannenberg

Profound and universal issues are explored in this noteworthy poetic coming-of-age debut. The mother-daughter relationship and breaking with the faith one’s been raised in. Judith, who’s preparing for her school-leaving exams, has grown up in a strict religious environment. She lives with her single mother in a flat owned by the church, and the two often ask themselves the question ‘What would Jesus do?’. In their world it’s customary to follow God’s plan, which often channels women into teacher training – but Judith wants to study at the conservatory. A spark is lit in Judith when she ventures  to the local snack bar on a Sunday. There she meets Dorian, a girl with dyed hair and a leather jacket: she is the very opposite of Judith. Judith wrestles with herself in the run-up to the audition at the conservatory: is this what God wants of her? But the question what she herself wants is becoming increasingly important. In the end, Judith is not accepted at the conservatory, yet her resolve to break free grows. The final chord of this sensitive book is both strong and moving. Judith plays a psalm on her cello and decides it’s her last. She takes Dorian’s hand in hers and together they leave the church.

With her debut novel Small Sacred Things, Annemieke Dannenberg has added a new voice to the canon of young authors reckoning with their Protestant upbringing: violence between women and a stifling mother-daughter relationship.

Who determines your path in life? God, your mother or you?

Stella Rieck

Kleine heilige dingen

Small Sacred Things is Annemieke Dannenberg’s first novel. Judith, the main character, is in her final year at school and has to make choices that contradict everything she’s grown up with. Should she do teacher training locally, as is expected of her, or go to the conservatory in Amsterdam, to follow her true vocation?

Small Sacred Things

Hanna Bervoets

The protagonist is Ellie, an isolated, unemployed young woman who tells her story in the form of an apologia. After burning out in her job, she starts successfully investing in the stock market using an app called Matador. She buys shares in an ailing Australian wine company called Royal Estate because the word on the internet is they’re about to be worth a lot of money. Ellie’s goal is to buy 350 grams of gold to bury underneath her house. She’s also preparing for possible catastrophe by stockpiling gas masks and other survival gear.     When her high-school best friend Freya reaches out to ask for help, Ellie introduces her to the world of investing. Ellie feels like she owes it to Freya, who was her savior during their teenage years. Freya then shares this financial knowhow with a group of friends. As stock prices go up and the women get richer, they find themselves coming down with all kinds of ailments. Ellie suffers from panic attacks. She is forced to cash in her investments before the stock collapses. Freya’s friends think Ellie set them up and decide to take revenge – with fatal consequences.      Making Money brilliantly exposes how neoliberalism has transformed our lives and relationships. What starts as Ellie’s attempt to get her own financial situation under control leaves her feverishly grappling with questions of integrity and friendship. This riveting novel deftly weaves together topics like fintech, power dynamics in relationships, and the impact of viral trends. Making Money raises questions that will stick with you long after you put the book down.

Making Money is vintage Hanna Bervoets: chewy, in touch with the zeitgeist, and with a dark edge.

Bervoets  surpasses in this novel in which humankind’s most unpleasant and most vulnerable features are inextricably linked. A propulsive pageturner.

An enthralling novel about money, retribution and sisterhood

Antonia Kasoulidou

Geld verdienen

Hanna Bervoets excels at provocative novels that tackle current issues. She has previously delved into the world of online content moderators, technology and alienation. This time around, she turns her attention to the dark side of modern financial culture. Two friends get caught up in the world of influencers and social media – a venture that strains their finances and ultimately their moral compass.

Making Money

Sarah Arnolds

‘Fire’ is about a teenage girl who wants nothing more than to escape the dreary setting in which she is growing up. She and her friends play a game called ‘fire’: if your house was on fire, what three things would you rescue? In the tense climax, the girl finds herself in this very situation: forced to make three choices. In ‘Your girlfriend buys fish at the market’, a man tries to hide from the outside world that he’s being physically abused by his girlfriend. There’s something wrong in this relationship, but what? Something that’s unsaid can in fact be all-consuming. Concealing the unequal dynamics in the relationship means they are living a lie.  The stories in The Sheer Nerve vary in length  and are marked by a high degree of absurdism: sometimes an element from one story reappears in another. Each story is original, sparkling, sharp funny and packed with interesting observations and familiar situations.

The Sheer Nerve by Sarah Arnolds causes separation anxiety: you don’t want to let go of the characters.

An impressive book, The Sheer Nerve leaves you wanting more.

Original, sparkling, sharp and funny

Het gore lef

Lying is so easy. Anyone can do it. You lie to your friends, your masseur, your parents, your children, your partner and even yourself. It’s difficult to stop. 

A lot of lying goes on in the seven stories in The Sheer Nerve. Because a lie is a great way to escape reality, which is often too painful or too boring. But a barefaced lie is too simple – these stories are about something more subtle, there’s more going on. They’re also about the image people have of themselves, in combination with what others make of them. The result: a creative approach to the truth

The Sheer Nerve

New Dutch Fiction

Spring 2025

Autumn 2024

Spring 2024

Autumn 2023

Spring 2023

Autumn 2022

Spring 2022

Autumn 2021

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>

Non-Fiction

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

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

Maurits de Bruijn

Conscience is a personal account of the interconnected histories of the Palestinian people and his own history as a Jewish Dutchman and descendant of a family torn apart by the Holocaust. The first half of the book explores his own experiences and thoughts about Israel and Zionism, and the second half charts his dangerous journey to Israel and Gaza where he witnesses IDF patrols, terrorism, colonists and expulsions and the lack of human rights afforded to Palestinians. His tears are no help and his grandparents would have been horrified. How can this reality be reconciled with the discourse back home?In this accessibly-written book about one of the most degrading disasters of the 21st century, De Bruijn weaves the different threads into a story that can be read as an appeal to the reader not to hide behind ignorance. He offers no clear-cut solutions but a moral judgement: Israel’s political course is ‘a sacrilegious road that much be condemned and challenged’. It is searing personal reckoning with identity, history, and the cost of silence.<ul><li>Bestselling title: 8,500 copies sold</li><li>A Jewish LGBTQ writer confronts his own moral crisis</li><li>Proceeds from the book are being donated to a Palestine food agency</li><li>Boekenbon Prize longlist</li></ul>

Maurits de Bruijn writes because he has to – out of conscience, out of love, out of responsibility. Beautiful, personal, moving.

'Conscience' is a profound, multifaceted story that stirs up more than just hearts and hateful reactions, about one of the most degrading disasters of the 21st century.

A Jewish writer breaks his personal boycott of Israel to document the reality of Palestine’s occupation

Geweten: Over Israël en Palestina

Part travelogue, part moral memoir, this isn’t just another book explaining the conflict in the Middle East, but the personal quest of an Amsterdammer whose grandparents were murdered in Sobibor. In late 2024, De Bruijn received an invitation from an NGO fighting against the oppression of Palestinians to join a delegation of other activists to observe and write about the occupation on the ground. He hesitated, he’d vowed never to visit Israel again after the events of 7th October 2023. A sense of duty prevails, and he decides to ‘look the beast in the mouth.’

Conscience: On Israel and Palestine

Dutch Non-Fiction

Ludwig Volbeda

Ludwig Volbeda writes as he draws: sensitively, intimately and with striking observations and metaphors that gradually give the reader insight into Jip’s innermost thoughts. He doesn’t immediately reveal whether Jip is a boy or a girl: the reader has to search for Jip’s identity, just as Jip does. What is clear, though, is that Jip is good at ‘twilight dreaming’ and isn’t just mad about insects (Jip wants to study biology) but also about the new boy at school. In a series of emotional letters (which aren’t sent), Jip confides in the new classmate about missing their best friend Oever, who deliberately disappeared from Jip’s life because he had difficulty with how others defined Jip – and therefore him. By writing the letters, Jip goes on a journey of self-discovery and realises what a defining role that childhood friendship played: ‘When I was seven, I saw a boy for the first time. That was how it felt, like seeing a real boy for the very first time,’ says the struggling adolescent. ‘I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get to know him or if I wanted to be him. All I knew for certain was that I wanted to stay close to him for the rest of my life, so that I could find out. Do you get it?’ What emerges is a magnificent, authentic and striking self-portrait in words, which reveals that Jip’s outward and inner self are not in harmony. When, after kissing the new classmate in an amusing scene, Jip finally finds the courage to see the real Jip, the school assignment works out, in a hopeful conclusion to a unique, exquisitely written book that is not to be missed.

<ul><li> A coming-of-gender story </li><li> Stylistically sophisticated </li><li>An unforgettable protagonist</li></ul>

It is rare to encounter a book about gender identity written with the attention and finesse of Oever.

It doesn’t often happen that you read a debut and immediately feel that you’re dealing with an author in a league of their own.

Children's books

Jip has to make a self-portrait for school. But even though the teenager has a talent for drawing and ‘a head that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside’, every attempt fails. ‘The problem isn’t with the letters in the assignment,’ Jip realises. The ‘portrait’ part is fine. No, it’s the word ‘self’ – what is Jip supposed to do with that?

Oever

Sjoerd Kuyper

Sjoerd Kuyper makes no bones about it. Humans have brought this flood upon themselves by their greed and destructiveness. ‘They saw nothing, heard nothing, or pretended not to,’ he writes, ‘because they didn’t want to hear or see anything. The sun burned more harshly than ever, but they called it nice weather for a barbecue and everyone became richer and everyone thought they were entitled to everything and everyone flew all over the world.’ Kuyper’s vision of the future may be bleak, but his tone is anything but. He refers to the book as ‘a mischievously playful dystopia’. It’s a fair description: right from the opening scene, the jokes race by at the same pace as the bizarre adventures. Meanwhile, Kuyper speaks through the mouth of Grandpa Leon to vent his dissatisfaction with our current era, covering everything from the decline of democracy to the reading crisis to fake news. When Kuyper’s heroes wash ashore on Atlantis (a hypermodern mountain-based dictatorship, as the story about it being a sunken island turns out to be fake news), the refugee crisis comes up too. The heartless admission policy speaks volumes, as do the starving asylum seekers at the gates of Atlantis. But Moos, Grandpa Leon and their friends are irredeemable optimists, trying with all their might to save the world. Meanwhile, Kuyper’s love of life and all the beauty that is at risk of being lost fills the pages of this book, with beautiful, poetic Kuyper sentences and hope that everything will turn out well, as long as we keep on caring about one another and, above all, believing in the power of stories. In short, this is a book that you need to read.

12+ <ul><li>A thrilling adventure set in the future </li><li>Both hilarious and horrifying </li><li>Lively and poetic use of language </li><li>With an important message </li><li>Memorable protagonists</li></ul>

Kuyper is angry but, above all, he is a writer. One with an imagination that shoots off in all directions and a stylistically flawless pen.

An ode to the imagination. Unbelievably fantastic and horribly realistic at the same time.

Fourteen-year-old Moos wakes up to find Leon, his foster grandfather, sailing into his room, complete with his bed. The world has been engulfed by a devastating flood. Fortunately, Moos is prepared: a raft carrying his grandpa’s old Buick and sufficient food and tobacco for Grandpa proves to be a lifesaver, and a frantic adventure ensues, full of social criticism.

The Great Flood

Lida Dijkstra

Djenné Fila

In his luxurious cell, he receives important guests who want to hear about his experiences. Even the prison director comes by for a visit and the maid Topina secretly eavesdrops from the corridor. When she discovers that a well-known writer is locked up on another floor, she steals the keys from the guard and brings the two men together, so that they can create a book. As a reward, she is allowed to listen in on their discussions. The stories are beautiful in themselves, but the conversations that the narrator and the writer have about them are even more interesting. Marco Polo doesn’t want a sensational tale, but a guide for merchants, who need to know about the quality and the prices of grass, grains and other goods from the East. Rustichello da Pisa, on the other hand, who has already written a successful novel, advises him to add gory and romantic details. When Marco Polo finally gives in, Rustichello notes with satisfaction: ‘We are creating a book that hordes of people will want to copy.’ As everyone knows, the book about Marco Polo’s travels was indeed published. To this day, scholars speculate about it: what is true and what is made up? With palpable pleasure, Dijkstra leaves that question open, adding her own stories into the mix. So, the reader experiences not only the colourful story of Marco Polo visiting Kublai Khan and the exciting experiences of the orphan girl Topina but also a discussion about fact and fiction, which is perfectly easy for curious young readers to follow and – whether true or not – is, above all, exciting and captivating. Age: 11+ <ul><li>The perfect combination of fact and fiction </li><li>History meets fantasy </li><li>Focus on a fascinating historical character </li><li>Packed with fun stories </li></ul>

History flows from Dijkstra’s pen.

Beautiful atmospheric illustrations by Djenné Fila.

A wonder of a book.

An intriguing look at a historical  figure and the relationship  between fact and fiction, with  plenty of fun along the way

De wonderverteller

Marco Polo, famous even in his own lifetime, has returned home after years of travel and immediately finds himself in a tricky political situation. His hometown of Venice is at war with Genoa, and the adventurous merchant is imprisoned by the Genoese.

The Teller of Wonders

Yorick Goldewijk

The sloth’s story is the first short tale in this book about the very different creatures living in one and the same tree. There’s a caterpillar who refuses to grow up and become a moth. A swallow who’s lost something but doesn’t know what. Among the roots of the tree, a bear wakes up – and he’s not in the mood for spring. A grumpy woodlouse demands that there should be a story about him, too. The highlight is perhaps the cannibalistic aphid who eats her brothers and sisters in her sleep. Or was it just a dream? The poetic read-aloud stories have a friendly, humorous undertone and are subtly interconnected. The two pikes, for example, who are bothered by the sloth at night, haven’t spoken to each other in a long time. When you compare one pike’s story to the other’s, this turns out to be a tragic misunderstanding. Such connections and the double meanings in some of the stories make them perfectly suited for reading aloud and then talking about. The atmospheric illustrations by Jeska Verstegen, who puts her own subtle spin on the stories, also draw the reader in. This collection is a new and original contribution to the genre of the animal tale, so popular with children and with the people who read stories to them. Age: 6+ <ul><li>Original tales told with wit and imagination</li><li>Perfectly matched illustrations that are full of life</li></ul>

Another new step for Goldewijk.

A wonderful book that you should read at least twice

A collection of philosophical animal stories packed with humour and casual wisdom

De boom die een wereld was

Night is when the sloth likes to party. During the daytime, he hangs on his branch and acts like he’s doing nothing. But as soon as darkness falls, he starts doing somersaults and causing a commotion at the nearby lake, 
where the pikes are trying to sleep. The other inhabitants of the tree pretend they don’t know what’s going on. Meanwhile, they’re all getting on with their own lives and their own little dramas.

The Tree That Was a World

Spring 2021

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With these catalogues, we proudly present a curated selection of books published in the Netherlands. Each book featured has been chosen for its artistic excellence and commercial success. It is distributed free of charge to foreign publishers and editors.

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