The unnamed narrator, a young musicologist, meets and befriends the famous blind music critic Marius van Vlooten. Their first encounter is on an airplane en route to a master class in Bordeaux, where the narrator introduces Marius to Suzanna, the pretty, first violinist of a string quartet there to perform Janacek's Kreutser Sonata. From this chance meeting a passionate love affair soon develops between Marius and Suzanna. They become engaged and marry." A series of subsequent conversations between Marius and the narrator reveal the truth behind Marius's blindness when he was a young student, he had fallen madly in love with a girl who spurned him. Despairing, he tried to commit suicide, but succeeded only in blinding himself. Now, ten years later, Marius is prey to another terrible dilemma, he loves Suzanna desperately but strongly suspecting she has a lover, becomes insanely jealous. His suspicions and his past draw him and the reader into a dramatic and tense Hitchcock-like...

Flame-haired Lucie raises horses on her father's farm. One summer day, she meets a dark, handsome stranger named Joseph, and it is love at first sight. But their union is as improbable as their love is deep. For Joseph is a wanderer, a full-blooded gypsy for whom all of Europe is a stomping ground. Despite their cultural differences, they marry, have three children, and lead a normal life—with one exception: each spring, Joseph takes to the road to return to his other family, the gypsies, scattered to the four corners of Europe.More than a moving love story, Duke of Egypt is an exploration of gypsy identity, as revealed over centuries and across continents through the stories that Joseph tells to his wife. It is a tale of glory overshadowed always by grim reality that led to the gates of Auschwitz. Yet when the private world of Joseph and Lucie is threatened, the strength of their love and the strength of the gypsy spirit fuse to lift their story onto a...

A woman gets up in the middle of a wintry night and starts baking a cake while her lover sleeps upstairs. When it's time for her to take the cake out of the oven, we have read a story of romance and death. The narrator of this novel was widowed years ago and is trying to find new passion. But the memory of her deceased husband and a shameful incident still holds her in its grasp. Why did he do it? Margriet de Moor, the grande dame of Dutch literature, tells a gripping love story about endings and demise, rage and jealousy, knowledge and ambiguity—and the possibility of new beginnings.

On the night of January 31, 1953, a mountain of water, literally piled up out of the sea by a freak winter hurricane, swept down onto the Netherlands, demolishing the dikes protecting the country and wiping a quarter of its landmass from the map. It was the worst natural disaster to strike the Netherlands in three hundred years.The morning of the storm, Armanda asks her sister, Lidy, to take her place on a visit to her godchild in the town of Zierikzee. In turn, Armanda will care for Lidy's two-year-old daughter and accompany Lidy's husband to a party. The sisters, both of them young and beautiful, look so alike that no one may even notice. But what Armanda can't know is that her little comedy is a provocation to fate: Lidy is headed for the center of the deadly storm. Margriet de Moor interweaves the stories of these two sisters, deftly alternating between the cataclysm and the long years of its grief-strewn aftermath. While Lidy struggles to survive,...