Highly recommended: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Read this stunning novel!
See the New York Times Review of Books for a review.

Het koningsboek ("literair thriller")

"De jonge IJslander Valdemar reist in 1955 naar Denemarken, waar hij een aan lagerwal geraakte hoogleraar ontmoet, die een groot geheim met zich meedraagt. Tijdens de oorlogsjaren is hij een kostbaar manuscript uit het oog verloren: de Codex Regius, een onderdeel van de Edda, het manuscript uit 1271 waaraan het IJslandse volk zijn identiteit ontleent. Als de hoogleraar hem in vertrouwen neemt, maakt Valdemar zich op voor een reis door Europa. Zijn doel is het manuscript terug te vinden - en in leven te blijven. Want, zo blijkt, voor deze schat zijn mensen bereid over lijken te gaan.
Het koningsboek is een faction-thriller over de waarde van cultureel erfgoed. Toen de Deense regering in 1971 besloot de Codex Regius per boot terug te brengen naar IJsland, een voormalige Deense kolonie, stond het op de kade in Reykjavík zwart van de mensen. Twaalf pagina's van het middeleeuwse manuscript ontbraken echter - en zijn nog steeds niet teruggevonden." (Recensie: www.bol.com)

Beautiful prose in "Little Bee"

I heartily recommend "Little Bee" - on order for the library. Review and excerpt follow:

"Ten pages into Little Bee, I decided there's no reason to write again - not even an e-mail. There's no reason to read again, either. Chris Cleave has done something truly stunning with language in this book, but it's not just the language. The story is fascinating and utterly believable".

"Little Bee is a Nigerian girl who has learned to talk like the Queen. She's a refugee who has been detained in an immigration detention center forty miles east of London for two years. I've never heard a Nigerian woman speaking the Queen's English, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the dialogue. But I believed in Little Bee from the first paragraph, and I loved her by page eighteen, (where Cleave has Little Bee say):

"I looked back at the detention officer, but he would not look up at me. While I looked, he moved his arm over the page to cover the headline. He made it look like he needed to scratch his elbow. Or maybe he really did need to scratch his elbow. I realized I knew nothing about men apart from the fear. A uniform that is too big for you, a desk that is too small for you, an eight-hour shift that is too long for you, and suddenly here comes a girl with three kilos of documents and no motivation, another one with jelly-green eyes and a yellow sari who is so beautiful you cannot look at her for too long in case your eyeballs go ploof, a third girl from Nigeria who is named after a honeybee, and a noisy woman from Jamaica who laughs like the pirate Bluebeard. Perhaps this is exactly the type of circumstance that makes a man's elbow itch." [By Jessica Gribble @ http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/little-bee.htm]

Brilliant read: Incendiary by Chris Cleave

"The un-named narrator of this book certainly feels like writing a letter - she has got a lot of patience to pour out 300 pages in the direction of Osama bin Laden. An Islamic terrorist attack demolished one quarter of a football stadium while her husband and four year old lad were having an innocent time of watching their team beat their greatest rivals.
She has her own narrative style - as she says at one point, she's not sure on where to put commas, so hardly uses them. She has a unique way with metaphors and similes, and breaks often into tabloidese, headline-style capitalised nouns like a TRUE ORIGINAL. (A) brilliantly astute look at life with guilt, incrimination, love and the lack thereof, and more, after tragedy." (From: the Bookbag, John Lloyd)