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  • Cover In the Footsteps of the Burgundians
    Cover In the Footsteps of the Burgundians

    Following his bestseller ‘The Burgundians’, of which over 375,000 copies were sold across Europe, Bart Van Loo has written another fascinating journey about our distant past. In the final part of his diptych, ‘In the Footsteps of the Burgundians’, the author brings the Late Middle Ages back to life in inimitable fashion.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Cover 'My Comrade, Che Guevara'
    Cover 'My Comrade, Che Guevara'
    My Comrade, Che Guevara
    Four books for the price of one: an adventurous travelogue, a suspenseful whodunit, a biography and a history book
    Gazet van Antwerpen

    Hilde Baele met Mzee Jerôme Sebasoni, a gardener, in Kigali, Rwanda. He told her his incredible life story. He claimed to have fought against the Belgians and to have been a close comrade of Che Guevara’s in the struggle to oust the Congolese dictator Mobutu. Baele roped in her illustrator friend Jeroen Janssen to help her get to the bottom of Che's guide's claims. All the powerful graphic material in this impressive book was sketched and painted on the spot by Janssen. This is a remarkable testament to an extraordinary life story.

  • Reports from the Valley - cover
    Reports from the Valley - cover
    Reports from the Valley
    A sincere ode to the beauty of nature
    De Morgen

    Each of the observations in this book reflects Brijs’ passion for flora and fauna, his curiosity about the unknown and his hunger for knowledge. Despite the sense of decline, Brijs also makes room for observations that demonstrate that with minimal effort, judicious use of knowledge and lots of good will conservation is certainly possible.

  • Japan
    Japan

    When we hear ‘Japan’, we tend to think of geishas, samurai and sumo wrestlers populating a country wedded to ancient customs and traditions. Japan expert Luk Van Haute paints a picture of Japanese society as far more diverse than some would have us believe.
     

  • De klank van de stad
    De klank van de stad
    The Sound of the City
    A book of international importance.
    De Standaard

    Venice, that city of water and gondolas, is a living memory of more than five centuries, packed to the rafters with cultural history. Walking a fine line between heritage and cliché, this book is intended as a tribute to the artists who have captured the sounds and colours of Venice in their work.

  • Brutopia
    Brutopia
    Brutopia
    Those who have read 'Brutopia' will be seeing this metropolis through different eyes
    Cutting Edge

    Since Donald Trump dismissed Brussels as a ‘hellhole’, the city has become world famous. Brussels has its fans, but it is also the most hated city in Belgium and the European Union. In this fascinating and very readable urban biography Pascal Verbeken debunks the widespread clichés and prejudices about contemporary Brussels by looking at its history with all its dreams and failures.

  • Cover A Room in Ostend
    Cover A Room in Ostend
    A Room in Ostend
    A wealth of beautifully composed stories
    Tzum

    Writer Koen Peeters and painter Koen Broucke, both fascinated by Ostend, wander through the streets in search of the town’s soul. ‘A Room in Ostend’ is a moving and sometimes ironic account of their peregrinations. It is a book about friendship, loss, self-reflection, adventures big and small and the magic that encounters can bring.

  • Cover When the water breaks
    Cover When the water breaks
    When the Water Breaks
    Empathy is the raw material all his books are made of
    Humo

    This is the true story of a fisherman and his daughter, who fled their home country Vietnam some time ago. Hung crossed the ocean in his small fishing vessel to start a new life in a village behind a high sea wall. Quyen opened a successful restaurant, but is now struggling with an identity crisis.

  • Cover Back to Neerpelt
    Cover Back to Neerpelt
    Return to Neerpelt
    Lieve Joris views half the world as her village. Therein lies the universal and personal power of her books.
    Ons Erfdeel

    Lieve Joris has acquired an international reputation as an author of non-fiction travelogues. For many years she travelled around Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and more recently China, and considered the world to be her village. Now she has returned to Flanders, to Neerpelt, to the house by the canal where she grew up as the middle child in a chaotic family of nine.

  • Cover Andalusian Logbook
    Cover Andalusian Logbook
    Andalusian Journal
    He embodies his perspective, which is analytic and constantly eager to learn
    NRC Handelsblad

    Forgotten celebrities, hidden masterpieces and unique areas of nature. This logbook is a colourful collection of notes and impressions, experiences and stories about the nature, culture, history and people of Andalusia.

    With the inquisitive gaze that characterises all his works, Stefan Brijs takes a first look at the riches of his new home port.

  • Cover - Abadingi
    Cover - Abadingi
    Abadaringi
    His most personal and at the same time most universal book
    De Standaard

    'Abadaringi’ is a sketchbook and an intriguing documentary about the genocide in Rwanda. Janssen draws the landscapes and settings he encounters, and creates portraits of the people he speaks to. He also tells his own story, in handwritten notes. A phenomenal piece of journalism.

  • Cover Grand Central Belge
    Cover Grand Central Belge
    Grand Central Belge
    Verbeken brings back to life the era of the great expectations
    De Volkskrant

    Pascal Verbeken registers the small and the large signs of the times. He listens to a multicoloured collection of Belgians and their unique, sometimes tragic stories. ‘Grand Central Belge’ is a requiem for a divided country that does not succeed in chasing its old demons away.

  • Cover Ex. About a Country Gone Missing
    Cover Ex. About a Country Gone Missing
    Ex. About a Country Gone Missing
    A beautifully written travel story, a political history and a philosophical meditation
    De correspondent

    In a very poetic style and with a keen eye for the unexpected detail, Peter Vermeersch wrote a compelling literary narrative about the post-war experience in former Yugoslavia.

  • Cover - Doel
    Cover - Doel

    The polder village of Doel, situated in the shadow of a nuclear reactor near the port of Antwerp, has been a pawn in the power games of successive politicians since the 1960s. Jeroen Janssen became fascinated by those who stayed behind and by their stories. ‘Doel’ is an impressive account of a personal journey of discovery in a village whose fate has long been uncertain.

  • Cover On the Wings of the Dragon
    Cover On the Wings of the Dragon
    On The Wings of the Dragon
    Much is currently being written about the Chinese exploitation of Africa, but who is writing about the price China pays? The answer: Lieve Joris, and brilliantly, too.
    NRC Handelsblad

    What happens when people meet who do not share a colonial past? With that question in mind, Lieve Joris leaves Africa for China. In keeping with the modus operandi she has refined over past decades, she immerses herself in the world of Africans and Chinese who venture into each other’s territory in the slipstream of the big trade contracts.

  • Cover The Naked Peartree
    Cover The Naked Peartree
    The Naked Peartree
    This book lifts Rotthier into the upper echelons of our authors.
    Humo

    Rotthier visits every place in which Spinoza lived and examines the impact on the present-day Netherlands of his vision of a rational society.

  • Cover Russia's Fortune
    Cover Russia's Fortune
    Russia’s Fortune. A Journey to the Loneliest People on Earth
    An impressive collection of travelogues
    Geert Mak

    When Johan De Boose packs his bags, readers know they are in for a treat. Russia’s Fortune takes him to the heart of his first love. Given that De Boose is both a romantic and a sceptic, he manages to find a perfect balance between unconditional enthusiasm and sober observation. De Boose never flinches from asking questions about himself either. Could his passion for Russia have anything to do with a predilection for tragedy and suffering?

     

     

  • Cover The High Planes
    Cover The High Planes
    The High Plains
    Journalism, only better than that; the literature of reality
    Liberation

    They walk from market to market, sleeping in huts and schools, but gradually the power of the colonel starts to decline and the guide becomes increasingly insecure. The ancient landscape brings back powerful memories of Joris’ childhood village.

  • Cover The Rebels' Hour
    Cover The Rebels' Hour
    The Rebels' Hour
    A book that seems to have been written with a video camera on the shoulder
    L'Express

    Lieve Joris has written a lot about the African Congo. In The Rebels’ Hour, she chose the genre of faction to let the reader experience the complexity of human tragedy in what is called the African First World War.

  • Cover Back to the Congo
    Cover Back to the Congo
    Back to the Congo
    So evocative that it’s as if you have actually set out in the company of Lieve Joris.
    Nieuwsblad van het Noorden

    Fascinated since childhood by the stories of her great-uncle, a missionary in the Congo, Lieve Joris travelled to Africa in his footsteps in 1985. Back to the Congo tells of her search for the old Congo of the Catholic fathers, and for the Zaire of the ubiquitous President Mobutu.

  • Tuesday Land. Sketches of Belgium
    16 incisive observations by a stylistically strong writer who holds his readers’ attention with a great sense of timing and narrative skill
    De Tijd

    A declaration of love to the Belgian in the street, wonder at his pastimes, an ode to his beautiful, but archaic turns of phrase. And also: a deliberately fragmented narrative about a Belgian childhood, a chronicling of the things that pass. All this Verhulst describes, ponders and pokes fun at in his unique and inimitable style: fluent and smooth, incisive and ironic, as well as over-the-top and hilarious, but never without compassion.

  • Cover The Plague
    Cover The Plague
    The Plague
    A talented writer, original and funny, who is definitely one to watch
    Le Monde

    While working on his thesis, David Van Reybrouck came across the accusation that the Belgian writer and Nobel Prize winner Maurice Maeterlinck had plagiarised from the work of the South African author Eugène Marais. ‘The Plague’ sweeps the reader along in a thrilling literary adventure, which leaves its image on the mind’s eye long after the last page has been turned.

  • Cover The Leopard's Dance
    Cover The Leopard's Dance
    The Leopard's Dance
    Travel writing doesn’t get much better than this.
    New York Times Book Review

    All the problems of post-colonial Africa seem to rage there in exaggerated form. Ten years after her highly praised 'Back to the Congo', Lieve Joris was brave enough to return during a particularly precarious moment in Congolese history.

  • Cover Intercities
    Cover Intercities
    Intercities
    The great charm of this book lies in its explosive mix of opinion and storytelling.
    El Pais

    The result is a beautiful balance between intellectual understanding and personal impressions. His great strength is his ability to keep his eyes open in all circumstances and to surprise himself with the realization that ‘travelling often turns out to be a process of finding what you weren’t looking for’.