From "one of the greatest modern novelists" comes a haunting tale of angels, art, and modern love (A. S. Byatt).In Lost Paradise, Cees Nooteboom sets out to connect two seemingly unrelated strangers whom he has glimpsed on his travels, and to explore the major impact that small interactions can have on the course of our journeys.A beautiful woman aboard a Berlin-bound flight becomes Alma, a young lady who leaves her parents' São Paulo home on a hot...

In Rituals, Amsterdam of the fifties, sixties and seventies is viewed from the perspective of the capricious Inni Wintrop. An unintentional suicide survivor, the unexpected gift of life returned lends him the curiousity, and impartiality, to survey others' lives and rountines.Inni's opposite, the one-eyed downhill skier Arnold Taads measures his life by the clock, while his disowned son Philip follows Japanese rituals which themselves seem to render his existence meaningless.

"You might think there is little new to say about Venice, but Cees Nooteboom strolls down many under-explored alleyways in the city, his insights coloured by his knowledge of art and literature as welll as his past experiences . . . Witty and meditative by turns, the overall effect is like being shown around by a wonderfully self-effacing, but impressively erudite guide" The Sunday Times BOOKS OF THE YEAR"Nooteboom has achieved the impossible: to s...

A morose provincial inspector of roads in Aragon settles down to write the fable of the Snow Queen. The Netherlands has now been stretched into a vast country with Northern flatlands and hazardous Alpine ranges in the south. Kai and Lucia are circus illusionists, and when Kai is kidnapped, Lucia must rescue him from the Snow Queen's palace.In the Dutch Mountains is an elegantly constructed story within a story, laced with the wit that characterises the work of this outstanding Euro...

Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification.Nooteboom's writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe,...

"A lyrical 'book of days' . . . A bejewelled mosaic" Financial Times"Humane, insightful and deeply cultured" Times Literary SupplementThough a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, "the island of the wind", and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take...

The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Berlin—in the series that's "like a literary vacation" ( Publishers Weekly).In 1990s Berlin, the scars of a century of war were still visible everywhere: coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future.The abandoned ruins, the hidden...

The noted Dutch poet and novelist Cees Nooteboom reflects upon the life of the mind through a reexamination of books, music, art, travel, and gardeningThough a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, “the island of the wind.” It is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place. The result is not a di...

"An outstanding addition to an impressive oeuvre" Times Literary SupplementArthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, wanders the streets of Berlin, a city whose recent past provides the perfect backdrop for his reflections on life and the universe as he collects images for his latest project - a film that will show the world through his eyes.With his circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Daane dis...

Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come At Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. In 'Paula', the narrator evokes the mysterious, brief life of a woman he once loved; in 'Paula II', the same woman is aware of the man thinking of her. No lon...

“Profoundly unsettling . . . haunt[s] the mind for long afterwards.” —The Sunday Times“The kind of book that stays with you forever.” —The Guardian“Hugely entertaining." —The ScotsmanA Sunday Times Book of the Year: A brooding meditation on violence set during World War II—from a classic Dutch writer who has drawn comparisons to Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut

Beautifully translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, the IMPAC Award-winning translator of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, Hugo Claus’s poems are remarkable for their dexterity, intensity of feeling, and acute intelligence. From the richly associative and referential “Oostakker Poems” to the emotional and erotic outpouring of the “mad dog stanzas” in “Morning, You,” from his interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a modern adaptation of a Sanskrit masterpiece, this volume reveal...