On a cold night in Holland two men meet and change each other's lives forever. Max Delius - a hedonistic, yet brilliant astronomer who loves fast cars, nice clothes and beautiful women - picks up Onno Quist, a cerebral chaotic philologist who cannot bear the ordinariness of everyday life. Despite their differences, they fast become great friends. And when they learn they were conceived on the same day, it is clear that their meeting is no coincidence. As the pair fall into and out of love with the same woman - Ada - so their lives become further intertwined. For all three are on a mysterious journey destined to shape human history. The Discovery of Heaven is internationally recognized as a masterpiece. Rich in philosophical, psychological, historical and theological enquiry, it is an extravagant, bold and satisfying novel of ideas.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann began in 1961 under a deceptively simple label, "criminal case 40/61." Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the "New Yorker" magazine and recorded her observations in "Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil." Harry Mulisch was also assigned to cover the trial for a Dutch news weekly. Arendt would later say in her book's preface that Mulisch was one of the few people who shared her views on the character of Eichmann. At the time, Mulisch was a young and little-known writer; in the years since he has since emerged as an author of major international importance, celebrated for such novels as "The Assault" and "The Discovery of Heaven."Mulisch modestly called his book on case 40/61 a report, and it is certainly that, as he gives firsthand accounts of the trial and its key players and scenes (the defendant's face strangely asymmetric and riddled by tics, his speech absurdly baroque). Eichmann's character comes out in his incessant bureaucratizing and calculating, as well as in his grandiose visions of himself as a Pontius Pilate-like innocent. As Mulisch intersperses his dispatches from Jerusalem with meditative accounts of a divided and ruined Berlin, an eerily rebuilt Warsaw, and a visit to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, "Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann" becomes as a disturbing and highly personal essay on the Nazi extermination of European Jews and on the human capacity to commit evil ever more efficiently in an age of technological advancement.Here presented with a foreword by Deborah Dwork and translated for the first time into English, "Criminal Case 40/61" provides the reader with an unsettling portrait not only of Eichmann's character but also of technological precision and expertise. It is a landmark of Holocaust writing.

A novel that probes moral devastation in the wake of the slaughter of an innocent family by the Nazis in retaliation for the association with a Dutch collaborator.

A bracing meditation on the nature of evil and a moving evocation of the human heart, Siegfried is one of Harry Mulisch's most powerful novels. After a reading of his work, renowned Dutch author Rudolf Herter, who had recently commented in a television interview that it may be only through fiction that the uniquely evil figure of Adolf Hitler can be truly comprehended, is approached by an elderly couple. The pair reveal that as domestic servants in Hitler's Bavarian retreat in the waning years of the war, they were witness to the jealously guarded birth of Siegfried-the son of Hitler and Eva Braun. For more than fifty years they have kept silent about the child they once raised as their own. Only now and only to Herter are they willing to reveal their astonishing story.

The Discovery of Heaven, Harry Mulisch's magnum opus, is a rich mosaic of twentieth-century trauma in which many themes— friendship, loyalty, family, art, technology, religion, fate, good, and evil— suffuse a suspenseful and resplendent narrative.

The story begins with the meeting of Onno and Max, two complicated individuals whom fate has mysteriously and magically brought together. They share responsibility for the birth of a remarkable and radiant boy who embarks on a mandated quest that takes the reader all over Europe and to the land where all such quests begin and end. Abounding in philosophical, psychological and theological inquiries, yet laced with humor that is as infectious as it is willful, The Discovery of Heaven lingers in the mind long after it has been read. It not only tells an accessible story, but also convinces one that it just might be possible to bring order into the chaos of the world through a story.