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Narrative nonfiction

trans­lated into
  • How the Pain Sings
    How the Pain Sings
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    How the Pain Sings
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  • My Parents' Banquet Hall
    My Parents' Banquet Hall
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    My Parents’ Banquet Hall
    Warm, generous, down-to-earth – and yet a snake in this paradise. Spellbinding!
    Geert Mak

    In ‘My Parents’ Banquet Hall’, Els Snick opens the doors one last time to the iconic De Visscherie in Oostrozebeke, West Flanders. For generations, hundreds of families celebrated weddings, anniversaries and even funerals there. Shortly before the building was demolished in 2017, Snick organised one final, warm reunion – a return to a place full of high spirits, traditions and hidden histories.

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    Monstrous Motherhood
    This book grabbed me as fiercely as a painful contraction.
    Rekto:verso

    In her literary nonfiction debut ‘Monstrous Motherhood’, essayist and critic Jozefien Van Beek investigates the expectations, anxieties and contradictions surrounding motherhood. Drawing inspiration from films, artworks, and feminist thinkers, she poses a central question: is it perhaps not only mothers who are monstrous, but motherhood itself?

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  • Archive of possible loss
    Archive of possible loss
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    Archive of Possible Loss
    An atypical and completely original book
    De Standaard

    In ‘Archive of a Possible Loss’, Tine Hens goes in search of what is gradually slipping away from us in a rapidly changing world. She travels to landscapes under pressure – melting glaciers, depleted fields – and observes the animals and plants that are losing their habitats, such as the once so familiar lark. Along the way, she submerges herself in her own memory, where the old abundance still resonates.

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  • Cover Look! Over There, Look!
    Cover Look! Over There, Look!
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    Look! Over There, Look!
    A unique walking book in lively, meandering fragments.
    De Morgen

    In ‘Look! Over There, Look!’ 81-year-old Eric de Kuyper explores the urbanisation of Brussels’ municipalities and neighbourhoods in his signature, slightly old-fashioned style. He reflects on the architecture of streets and houses, façades and interiors encountered during his walks. The book offers a personal perspective on the city’s ‘architectural misery’, while also celebrating successful interventions in the Belgian capital.

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    Pulse
    ‘Peremen!’, the song that reveals a vital piece of European history
    De Standaard

    When the streets of Minsk filled with demonstrators in the summer of 2020, cameras captured a group of cheerfully dressed musicians performing a rousing version of ‘Peremen!’ (‘Changes!’), the Soviet cult hit by the band Kino. The crowd sang along at full volume, and the song became the anthem of the protests against Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko. Peter Vermeersch was so moved by the footage that he decided to chart the erratic life of this pop song. The result is ‘Pulse’, the story of a song that, in passing, reveals a crucial chapter of recent European history.

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  • Het geduld van de bloemen
    Het geduld van de bloemen
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    The Patience of Flowers
    His calmly crafted sentences, when read closely or reread, reveal something truly spectacular.
    NRC

    In Stefan Brijs' latest book, ‘The Patience of Flowers’, he once again takes the reader to Andalusia. As the climate becomes increasingly erratic, he observes the beauty and vulnerability of nature with a pen that is as sharp as it is poetic – both deeply empathetic and strikingly precise.

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  • Cover Roadtrip to Auschwitz
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    Road Trip to Auschwitz
    Smoothly written and excellently documented.
    Humanistisch Verbond

    After the death of her mother, Evelien Rutten embarks on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau during the winter of 2004. For the first time, she visits the place where her Polish grandmother once stood face to face with Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. A choice made in 1943 determined the survival of an entire family line. In the biting cold, the author solemnly promises her late mother and grandmother that she will return one day, once she has a daughter of her own. By 2023, her teenage daughter is old enough, and it’s time for a road trip: her daughter is about to receive the history lesson of a lifetime.

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  • Cover The Damiaan Farm
    Cover The Damiaan Farm
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    The Damiaan Farm
    A gripping story without a clear resolution.
    Boekenkrant.com

    On the banks of La Meuse, a centuries-old farm called Damiaan lies like an island in the river’s winter bed. During floods, the farm literally looks like an isolated fortress, protected by a two-metre-high ring dyke that Bert built single-handedly after the Christmas floods of 1993. The farm also becomes an island in a hostile environment for Bert after some shocking events.

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  • Cover Autobiography of My Body
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    Autobiography of My Body
    Spit knows how to squeeze your throat again. A book without compromises.
    NRC Handelsblad

    In this deeply personal work, Spit reflects on her difficult relationship with her mother, who is terminally ill. Spit’s mother had long struggled with alcohol and found communication very difficult, often expressing a desire to disappear. Growing up this way, Spit internalized some of these patterns, resulting in a complex relationship with her own body. ‘Autobiography of My Body’ is a deeply moving, confrontational, yet ultimately loving exploration of a daughter’s attempt to understand both her mother and herself. 

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  • Cover We, Roma
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    We, Roma
    Unrelenting and poignant testimonies
    Doorbraak.be

    Everybody has an opinion about Roma, but few people really know them. Their history is very complex, powerful and tragic; their diversity is so vast that no single flag can encompass it. One cannot speak of ‘the Roma’ as a single entity, there is not one Roma community. There are many, and they differ greatly from one another. 

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  • Een vlam Tasmaanse tijgers
    Winner of Boekenbon Literature Prize 2025
    Een vlam Tasmaanse tijgers
    Winner of Boekenbon Literature Prize 2025
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    A Flame of Thylacines
    For what a gifted (nature) writer she is.
    De Groene Amsterdammer

    In her highly anticipated second prose work, award-winning author Charlotte Van den Broeck explores the lost Tasmanian tiger’s legacy. Drawing on the tragic ecological history of the Tasmanian tiger, she reflects on loss, on hope in times of climate crisis, and the destructive and restorative powers of stories.

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  • Cover Ghosts of Budapest
    Cover Ghosts of Budapest
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    Ghosts of Budapest
    Reading about Ceustermans’ quest is enough to make you less nostalgic.
    Doorbraak.be

    During the Covid-19 crisis, Chris Ceustermans was beset by an existential emptiness that prompted musings about his student days in Leuven in the late 1980s, when he often spent time in the company of a Hungarian called Yuri. A dissident journalist for Radio Free Europe, Yuri had fled Hungary and was staying in the Collegium Hungaricum, where in unexplained circumstances he resorted to suicide. Yuri was of the same generation as Viktor Orbán, in those days an important voice in the liberal resistance to communism. Thirty years later, Ceustermans decided to travel to Budapest in search of answers to his questions.

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  • Cover Out of Reach
    Cover Out of Reach
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    Out of Reach

    This book is the total opposite of the famous ‘Voyage autour de ma chambre’ by Xavier de Maistre, although initially Lotte Lola Vermeer explores the world without leaving her room. Google Street View enables her to travel cheaply and tirelessly at her desk, since modern technology allows us to go absolutely everywhere, from dazzling Alaska to icy Siberia. That at least is the idea on which the author was relying. On one of her many digital journeys, however, she discovered that Street View ends abruptly at apparently random places.

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  • Cover Handicap
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    Disability

    Anaïs Van Ertvelde was born with a short right forearm. A matter of course for her, she thought, but other people seemed to question it. At a certain point she discovered that there was much more behind that disability, in both personal and social terms.

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  • Lost
    Lost
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    Lost
    Compelling, moving, astonishingly true to life – a masterpiece!
    Herman Van Goethem

    In ‘Lost’ Ingrid Vander Veken uses individual stories to describe the lesser-known pathways of the great events of history. She was contacted by the relatives of a family smashed to pieces by the Second World War, asking her whether, based on a paper archive, she would be willing to search for traces of a woman who, along with her young son, fled Nazi persecution for four years only to die in Auschwitz.

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  • Hildeke
    Hildeke
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    Hildeke
    A warm and humorous family portrait that’s brimming with love.
    ZIN Magazine

    Lieve Joris is an internationally renowned writer of non-fiction books about the Arab world, Africa, Eastern Europe and China. After writing about her much-admired and maligned brother Fonny in ‘Return to Neerpelt’, she revisits her family history in ‘Hildeke’. Her parents’ growing care needs pull her back to the Flanders of her youth: the mother she barely knew and the difficult father who was preoccupied with his prodigal son and who goes by the nickname ‘The Creator’.

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  • I, Cartographer
    I, Cartographer
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    I, Cartographer
    This is a major work by Jeroen Theunissen, one of our best wordsmiths. Impressive.
    David Van Reybrouck

    When he was around twenty, Jeroen Theunissen came across a map of Europe in a travel agency, with thick purple lines marking long-distance hikes. When, many years later, the writer starts suffering from anxiety attacks and depression and feels melancholic and trapped in an unhappy marriage, he leaves everything and everyone behind, including his two children, and embarks on a six-month walk from Southwest Ireland to the Bosporus Strait.

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  • De huisvriend
    De huisvriend
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    Friend of the Family
    Debruyne has written one of the most interesting autobiographical novels of the year.
    Tzum

    Heleen Debruyne was inspired to write ‘Friend of the Family’ after reading her grandparents’ letters and diaries. While pregnant with her first child, she immersed herself in an unsavoury family story that had been glossed over. She discovered how and why her father was deliberately entrusted to a friend of the family called Albert, Bertie to his friends, a rich homosexual. Debruyne intersperses the story with essayistic passages in which she contemplates motherly love and shifting beliefs about sexuality, love and intimacy. 

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  • Cover of The Discovery of Urk
    Cover of The Discovery of Urk
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    The Mystery of Urk
    In the Belgian with the funny accent, Urk has found its own Louis Theroux who has opened up the village to the rest of the world.
    Tzum

    Dissatisfied with an article about a murder on Urk he wrote as a burgeoning journalist, Matthias M.R. Declercq returns in a renewed effort to get to grips with one of the most peculiar villages in the Netherlands. For six months, Declercq lives in the most closed and orthodox fishing village in the Dutch Bible Belt, where he talks to the locals, prays with them, drinks with them, and even goes out fishing with them for a week. Little by little, the trust between them grows and a different reality comes to the fore.

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  • Waagstukken
    Waagstukken
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    Bold Ventures
    Van den Broeck has a very keen eye. But she also has a great mind. ****
    De Standaard

    Charlotte Van den Broeck is primarily known as a poet – in that capacity she opened the guest of honour presentation by Flanders and the Netherlands at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2016 – but ‘Bold Ventures’ is her extraordinary and highly distinctive debut as a non-fiction writer.

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