Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Dutch novelist de Moor ( Duke of Egypt ) traces narrative arabesques around the terrible romantic jealousy suffered by a blind music critic in this spare, delicate novel. In a series of chance encounters at European airports over the years, the musicologist narrator meets the famous blind patrician music critic, Marius van Vlooten, and extracts his history of tortured love. The first encounter elicits the... (more)

Spijkerschrift: Notities van Aga AkbarKader Abdolah

Spijkerschrift: Notities van Aga Akbar

by Kader Abdolah

Text: Dutch

The House of the Seven Sisters: A Novel of Food and Family

The House of the Seven Sisters: A Novel of Food and Family

by Elle Eggels, David Colmer

When Martha and her six sisters are abandoned by their father following their mother's untimely death, the family bakery becomes their only means of survival. Martha, the eldest, is forced to lead the household and take on the responsibilities of her missing father. Witnessed through Emma, Martha's daughter from a failed marriage, The House of the Seven Sisters follows the siblings as they mature and,... (more)

The Song and the Truth

by Helga Ruebsamen

Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies and Nazi-occupied Holland, this luminous novel delivers epic themes filtered through the rich imagination of a young girl. Living with her parents on the island of Java in the late 1930s, five-year-old Lulu moves in a magical world of daydreams and island myths. But when one day Lulu innocently describes a scene she stumbled across late one night, the repercussions... (more)

The ten thousand things: A novel

by Maria Dermou?t

An underground favorite, The Ten Thousand Things tells the story of Felicia, who, pregnant and alone, returns from Holland to the Indonesian islands where she was born and where her powerful grandmother still lives. Felicia's homecoming brings her close to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present.

A Heart of Stone

by Renate Dorrestein

In the words of bestselling author Susan Vreeland, "Renate Dorrestein knows how to chill her readers with tragedy and then melt their hearts with forgiveness." A Heart of Stone is a spare yet richly told novel that seamlessly alternates between past and present. Sparked by faded photographs in an old family album, the novel's narrator, Ellen, pieces together the frayed memories of an idyllic childhood. She... (more)

The Twins

by Tessa de Loo

Historical and human perspectives clash in this cool, compassionate, psychological novel that unfolds around the chance meeting of two elderly women at a Belgian health resort. Each woman has come for the famously curative waters, but it is no coincidence that both suffer from debilitating arthritis—the women are twins, separated in childhood by the death of their parents. Anna stayed in their native Germany,... (more)

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Tags: dutch fiction

The Kreutzer Sonata: A Novel

by Susan Massotty