A young geologist hungry for fame journeys to the mountains of Norway's Arctic north on a research expedition, but soon realizes he's more likely be eaten alive by mosquitoes than win glory. Freezing, wet and plagued by insomnia, Alfred becomes increasingly desperate and paranoid under the midnight sun, until he takes a catastrophic decision. This dazzlingly dark classic is at once a gripping survival story, a mordant farce and a peerless evocation of mental disintegration.

During the German occupation of Holland, tobacconist Henri Osewoudt finds himself drawn into the resistance when he is visited by the ruthless Dorbeck, who also happens to look remarkably like him. Soon Osewoudt is carrying out dangerous missions, helping British agents and killing collaborators with aplomb. But after the war, he is taken for a collaborator himself. How can he prove that he was on the right side - and how much of what he remembers is real? The Darkroom of Damocles is a razor-sharp thriller set in a world where everything is permitted, even murder. As unsettling and morally challenging today as when it was first written.

Mulder, a Dutchman, returns at last to South Africa, his memories scattered by forty years and two strokes. Once he fought to free the country from apartheid; now he finds its people asking whether years of democracy have left them any better off.

The village where his friend Donald - a comrade from his Fraternite days - lives is as segregated as ever: fishermen struggle to eke out a living and kids wreck their brains with crystal meth. Tensions are high: Donald wages a campaign against the local mayor; every day the whites add inches to their perimeter fences.

So when Mulder and Donald attempt to help a young tik-head get clean against his will, their muddled good intentions can only be misunderstood...

From the moment he meets Julia, Christiaan Dudok is dangerously close to love. But their first date is interrupted by S.A. Brownshirts storming into the cafe. It is 1937, and Germany is heading for war and fanaticism. Chris, a Dutchman, is both transfixed and appalled by the effect of Hitler's manic oratory on the people of Lubeck. The independence and freedom of thought that Chris finds so attractive in Julia leads her to emphatically reject the Nazi regime, and before long her courageous stance brings them both to the Gestapo's attention. Soon Chris is forced to make an impossible choice, the outcome of which he can only regret.

Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come at Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. And yet the tone of these stories is far from pessimistic: it seems that death is nothing to be afraid of.

Born into wealth and privilege, Rudolf Kerkhoven is destined to follow his father's footsteps into the Dutch colonies, with its uncleared jungle foothills and potential for riches. When he arrives in Java he is immediately smitten by the landscape and the life, and over the seasons, Rudolf's dedication and diligence gradually transform the land into a productive estate for tea, coffee and quinine. When he meets the independent-minded Jenny and their two sons are born, Rudolf is happier than he thought possible. But for Jenny, the damp austerity of their home, her fertility, her father's secret, and the native spirits of the land grow to overshadow their marriage and the life they've strived for together. Lusciously atmospheric and masterfully drawn, this is an unforgettable story of aspiration, determination, rivalry and romance on a tropical plantation.

The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom has had a long love affair with Spain, a country where he has lived and worked part of each year for several decades. Derived from studies and sketches made between 1979 and 1992, Roads to Santiago is his many-faceted pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, taking in countless digressions through ten centuries of Spain’s history – its politics, its architecture, its landscape and its people. His scholarly curiosity leads him to unravel countless mysteries of the country and to unfold the more obscure riches of Spain. The harvest of so much learning and a long immersion in Spain’s dramatic past and its lively present is a magnificent book. In Roads to Santiago Cees Nooteboom unlocks doors to a Spain we hardly know and which he has discovered through an obsession that has lasted forty years. It is a gracefully written and thought-provoking study of a fascinating land.

On the face of it Ara and Kit, two girls in the village school, have nothing in common. Ara, the elder, is large, earthy and illiterate; Kit, her junior, is lean, brainy and interested in abstractions. Ara likes animals; Kit just reads and thinks. If the two continue to see one another when they have grown up and left school, it is because Kit cannot leave her friend alone. She is irresistibly drawn to her. The inarticulate but intuitive Ara has a soothing effect on Kit who, in turn, acts as a stimulus on Ara. In Connie Palmen’s brilliant novel of ideas, the story of their friendship is told through the eyes of Kit, and it describes with astonishing precision just how a person, and especially a person growing up, is the battleground on which the obsessive claims of the mind and the instincts strive for domination.

Amid the lush abundance of Java's landscape, two boys spend their days exploring the vast lakes and teeming forests. But as time passes the boys come to realize that their shared sense of adventure cannot bridge the gulf between their backgrounds, for one is the son of a Dutch plantation owner, and the other the son of a servant. Inevitably, as they grow up, they grow estranged and it is not until years later that they meet again. It will be an explosive and emblematic meeting that marks them even more deeply than their childhood friendship did.