Spring brings a sense of renewal, and with it a vibrant new selection from Flanders. From Jeroen Olyslaegers’ sweeping historical canvas 'The Wonders' to Aline Sax’s haunting post-war portrait 'Nineteen Nineteen', this season’s fiction probes memory, identity and ideological fault lines. Non-fiction voices such as Jozefien Van Beek and Tine Hens reflect on motherhood, climate and inherited loss, while graphic narratives explore vulnerability and resilience. Together, these books offer a rich, timely panorama of Flemish writing at its most searching and inventive.
Pointedly expressed and with appropriate irony, Debruyne uses small, apparently trivial events to show how the frustration mounts and the tension rises. ****
De Standaard
In ‘Aline’ a young woman looks back on a period marked by struggles within her relationship, the challenges of motherhood and the pressures of a hostile environment. In Aline’s relationship the implicit expectations escalate into growing conflicts. Feminist literature and therapy provide less and less of a footing and the inner tension grows. Aline takes her pent-up anger out on the men around her. With sharp prose and a keen sense of irony, Debruyne uses ‘Aline’ to probe the fault lines of progressive morality.
Sax builds the story expertly, before inflicting a swingeing sledgehammer blow near the end.
Trouw
‘Nineteen Nineteen’ follows young Henry Bennett, a former British soldier, as he returns to Flanders in 1919, only months after the Armistice. Henry is overwhelmed by memories of battles, comradeship and above all the loss of friends such as Archie, with whom he had a close bond. With empathy, sensory power and an almost cinematic style, Aline Sax weaves together past and present to create an intense psychological portrait.
From the very first page, Depelchin propels the reader forward with great intensity, through brisk dialogue and vivid descriptions.
De Lage Landen
After his parents disappear, Jeremy grows up in Ptitami, the hook-up hotel run by his grandparents. It soon turns out that the hotel is a cover for the ‘red cow gang’, a shadowy organisation that brings the radical left and the radical right together. Their activities catch the attention of private detective Diane, who thinks that Jeremy may be the key to unmasking a dangerous underground network. Depelchin addresses subjects as diverse as parenthood, idealism that flips over into extremism, look-alikes and decadence, shaping a mythical narrative.
After years of silence, 75-year-old Kristien at last decides to share her story. During one long and intense therapy session, Kristien tells her therapist, Sophie, how her life was thrown off course after a new neighbour, Tove, moved in across the street. ‘The Last Session’ takes an unexpected turn when Kristien’s revelations touch on Sophie’s own traumatic childhood, and their lives begin to intertwine.
A melancholy gem. A novel that slows time and invites reflection. ****
NRC
‘Whiteout’ is a moving novel about the boundaries of language and memory, and about the complex bond between parents and children. With discerning observations and stylistic precision, Six makes the melancholy of leave-taking tangible.
A sophisticated, level-headed story about ‘disappointment that brings us to our knees’ and perpetually shattered hope.
De Morgen
‘Refuge’ follows a woman who, after years of activism, leaves her life in Belgium behind and withdraws to a remote valley in Normandy. In a simple house, she tries to relearn how to look: at the cows languidly grazing, birds skimming past, the rhythm of the seasons. But when the valley is hit by a devastating flood, her fragile new life is swept away overnight. For Peeters this is a way to ask a probing question: can you really flee a world in crisis?
A multifaceted, ambitious novel that can easily be read as a muscular ode to women.
Humo
In the late nineteenth century, Amandine and her twin brother Ambrose grow up in a wealthy Antwerp banking family. When Amandine reaches adulthood, she is given in marriage to an ambitious banker who makes his fortune in the colonial rubber industry. She seeks her freedom in an affair and in the supernatural. This is the account of a woman who refuses to look away, and of an era that is at once dazzling and devastating.
A beautifully fashioned gem; exceptionally relevant
Cutting Edge
If traumatic memories are handed down from one generation to the next, then we surely must have generations of consolation in our bodies as well. Can we move on from trauma to solace? And if we can, then how? In ‘How the Pain Sings’, Aya Sabi investigates these questions in a lyrical, intimate essay.
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.
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.
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?
Yugoslavia began as an aspiration, as the noble ideal of uniting the southern Slavic peoples. What followed was a meandering and often turbulent history: from kingdom to socialist republic, from tourist paradise to warzone.
Everyone has heard of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books. Far fewer people know that the surname of this bestselling British author points to his Flemish roots. The people who ventured across from Flanders to England in the early Middle Ages and settled there were known as Flemings – a designation that reflected both their origins and their reputation.
How do we hold on to hope in dark times? How do we stay human when faced with inhuman conditions? And what can we do when fundamental values such as freedom, tolerance and pluralism come under pressure? These are the central questions explored by Alicja Gescinska in ‘Women in Dark Times’.
‘Atman!’ is first-rate, as we’ve come to expect from Bart Moeyaert: sharp, clever and highly relevant.****1/2
Knack
Atman goes to get a loaf of bread for himself and his dad, but he gets lost on the way back. Before he knows it, he’s been kidnapped by a female pirate captain who won’t be trifled with. Bart Moeyaert wrote ‘Atman!’ as a libretto, and it shows: the sentences flow and the rhythm is unmistakable. Mark Janssen goes to town with paint and coloured pencil. Together, they light-heartedly address sensitive subjects like uprootedness, loneliness and homesickness. ‘Atman!’ is a brilliant book that begs to be read aloud.
De Vlieger approaches her subject with sincere admiration, and it shows.
NRC on The Big Chicken Book
From the prehistorical apple through Greek myths and Norse gods via Newton to Snow White: Evelien De Vlieger tells fifteen stories in which the apple is central. The stories alternate with heaps of facts about apples. ‘The Fairest of Them All’ shows that an apple is far more than just the most boring option in the fruit bowl.
The pictures are marvels of illustration that hold your attention and stimulate the imagination.
Pluizuit
Deep under water, microplastics stick together to form colourful, surprising Things. As this evolution spreads onto land, a new species emerges that seems indestructible. Yet they struggle with a sense of emptiness. They dream of something more and what they invent is truly amazing: Life.
A highly original reversal of evolution that invites readers, with humour and imagination, to think about our throwaway society and how we treat the planet.
Marleen Nelen has a very measured writing style, which is seemingly simple but very moving.
Mappalibri on 'All Things Light'
Transylvania, 1874. After losing his mother, Mika and his father take to the road and meet a small group of Rom, with whom Mika feels very much at home. But Ayan wants to travel on with his son alone. When he is arrested, Mika is left on his own. Marleen Nelen depicts the travelling life beautifully and brings nineteenth-century Transylvania completely convincingly to life. ‘The Birds’ is a moving, unostentatious adventure novel about freedom and finding your own way.
A magnificent rhyming story with beautiful, dreamy drawings
Boekwijzer
King penguin Quinn is looking for Pip among the many penguins in the bay. She doesn’t look at beaks, feathers or feet; she searches with her ears. By listening carefully, Quinn finds Pip. And Pip has a surprise. An endearing story in sparkling rhyme for the smallest of children that celebrates diversity, brought to life with enchanting, atmospheric illustrations.
A moving and endearing gem of children’s literature.
Zilveren Griffel jury report on ‘Roversjong’
Pablo is a word doctor. His room is full of little beds for the words that he’s caring for: wrongly pronounced, misunderstood and almost forgotten words. Right on the top floor of the hospital lies the most special word of all: Sweetheart. It was the pet name his parents used for each other, but it hasn’t been spoken for a long time. Can Pablo still cure it?
This beautifully illustrated book shows that migration is common to all eras. From prehistory to the recent past: the reasons for migrating were as numerous then as they are today. De Gendt and De Jongh in no way limit themselves to Western history, which makes the book exceptionally valuable. ‘On the Move’ is much-needed and shows convincingly, and with empathy, that all humans are migrants – or at the very least, descendants of those who once set out in search of a life elsewhere.
Account of the Wrecking of the Merchant Ship Mytilida
Daring but brilliantly successful
De Morgen
On 17 April 1685, the merchant ship Mytilida leaves on a transatlantic voyage with enslaved people, child sailors and one all-seeing mussel on board. This remarkable mollusc keeps a log, recording everything that goes on above decks and below, yet it knows nothing about slavery.This raw, poetic and visually powerful book provides a fresh, subversive view of slavery, gives full scope to voices that history has often left unheard, and creates a lasting impression.
An uncommonly beautiful solo work. Dreamy, honest, with humour and compassion
9e kunst
In this little book, Sabien Clement reports in word and image from the eye of the storm: a severe burnout that has put her entire life on hold. ‘Brittlebrave’ is the word Clement invented for what she believes a person must be capable of being: vulnerable, yet fully aware of the strength that lies within that vulnerability. With her honest drawings and observations, the author fully exemplifies that word in this book.
Lucien is avoided like the plague: when he’s around, someone always dies. He lives like a hunted animal, but he can’t be wounded or killed. Not even he understands exactly who he is. This impressive and mysterious tale reads like an enchanting dream, and is an original and ingeniously composed graphic novel about the closeness of death.
In the wordless ‘PRHSTR’ Sébastien Conard places a faceless group of people from prehistory at centre stage. This brave move creates a very different kind of reading experience. This apparently abstract book is colourful, poetic and from time to time downright moving.
