(Atlas, 1999, 269 pagina's)

Jungle Rudy is Jan Brokken’s tribute to the legendary adventurer and pioneer Rudy Truffino, who spent the greater part of his life mapping, discovering and opening up the jungle in the south-east of Venezuela, once rightly called ‘The Lost World’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The book starts off with a brief sketch of Truffino’s life in the 1960s before he ended up in Venezuela, including a succesful attempt at escaping from a fire squad in the Domenican Republic. None of the events however could prepare him for the life that lay waiting.

(Atlas, 2008, 378 pagina's)

De Russische concertpianist Youri Egorov (1954-1988) was een cultheld. De schrijver Jan Brokken leerde Egorov kennen toen hij in de jaren zeventig een mooi, groot stuk over hem schreef voor een weekblad. Brokken reisde met Egorov mee naar een optreden in Engeland. Daar speelde Egorov de sterren van de hemel en wond zich op over het orkest, dat ongeïnteresseerd speelde: ‘Geen vonkje bevlogenheid, daar kan ik niet tegen.’

(Atlas Contact, 2010, 463 pagina's)

During a boat trip on the Baltic, Jan Brokken chanced upon Pärnu harbour, on the Estonian coast of the Gulf of Riga. It was an unforgettable introduction to the Baltic lands: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. The extraordinary light, the tranquil landscape and the stories he heard there drew him back time and again. In Baltic Souls, Brokken connects the cultural richness and social diversity of the region over the past eight centuries with tales of personal tragedy and a first-hand account of his travels.

(Atlas Contact, 2013, 383 pagina's)

The Reprisal is an unforgettable examina­tion in microcosm of the Second World War and everything connected with it: murder and arson, poverty and betrayal, heroic courage and illusions of happiness. Continually deliberating and investigat­ing, Brokken takes us with him into the underworld of a small Dutch village during the German occupation, ultimately raising more questions than he answers.

(Atlas Contact, 2015, 320 pagina's)

St Petersburg, 21 December 1849, and a man in his late twenties in a white shirt stands in front of a firing squad in the cold. He kisses the silver crucifix held to his lips by a priest, in the sure knowledge that he is about to die. Just before the command ‘Fire!’ is given, a pardon arrives from the Czar. The white-shirted man is the writer Fyodor Mikhaelovich Dostoyevsky. Alexander von Wrangel, a student, eleven years younger, is a witness.

(Atlas Contact, 2018, 450 pagina's)

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Dutch consul in Lithuania found a way to save the lives of thousands of Jewish people who had fled Poland, by giving them visas for the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean. Visas in hand, the refugees were able to take the Trans-Siberian railway to Japan and then disperse to all four corners of the globe. The vast majority of them survived the war.

(Atlas Contact, 2021, 224 pagina's)

Long before Jan Brokken (1949) was born, his parents lived in Indonesia, a Dutch colony at the time. Brokken never knew much about that part of his parents’ past.