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Narrative nonfiction

trans­lated into
  • Cover Autobiography of My Body
    Cover Autobiography of My Body
    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. 

  • Cover We, Roma
    Cover We, Roma
    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. 

  • Een vlam Tasmaanse tijgers
    Een vlam Tasmaanse tijgers
    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.

  • Cover Ghosts of Budapest
    Cover Ghosts of Budapest
    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.

  • Cover Out of Reach
    Cover 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.

  • Cover Handicap
    Cover Handicap

    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.

  • Lost
    Lost
    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.

  • Hildeke
    Hildeke
    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’.

  • I, Cartographer
    I, Cartographer
    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.

  • De huisvriend
    De huisvriend
    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. 

  • Cover of The Discovery of Urk
    Cover of The Discovery of Urk
    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.

  • Waagstukken
    Waagstukken
    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.