Fact queen Sofie Lemaire and a three-legged horse: these five books are worth your reading time

Alban Mik, Against all knowledge

A man chases a woman, it is stronger than himself, for no reason. Until he himself is chased. A boy pushes someone in front of the subway, but was that his own idea? And what if apartment resident Cornelisse doesn’t wear his lucky sweater? The Dutch debutant Alban Mik mercilessly drags you into fourteen strong, strange short stories in which he investigates situations between delusion and reality. When are you a perpetrator, a victim or perhaps both? Mik puts you on alert.

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Sofie Lemaire, A quick history

Radio and TV maker Sofie Lemaire is a fact queen who likes to dig between the folds of history, also in her podcast. Quick history to report on. Now her search for small-scale human ingenuity has been collected in book form. “Summary vandalism,” she calls it. How long have flea markets been around? Where does the fish stick, the ‘hot dog of the sea’, come from? And are there really seventy varieties of the ‘women’s tongues’, the sanseveria? And when did the word ‘deadline’ come into use?

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Bette Westera & Henriette Boerendans, Closer to the seasons

In this unique collaboration between Gouden Griffel winner Bette Westera and illustrator Henriette Boerendans, we stroll through the changing of the seasons and intensely experience a year in nature. It is wonderful that Westera tries out various verse forms, ranging from the sonnet, the quatrain to the haiku: ‘Pale blue blossom leaves flutter through the spring air and tickle the clay.’ Or there is a rondlet in which a hedgehog makes a safe bed of leaves. Boerendans makes matching, tender woodcuts.

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Bohumil Hrabal, A three-legged horse

In the spring of 1989, the famous Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) made a tour of a number of universities in the ‘Ennobled’ States, organized by Dubenka, nickname of an American Czech student who had visited him in Prague. Hrabal later recounts this turbulent journey in a rushing pseudo-letter form, while the Velvet Revolution is taking place in his own country, after which Václav Havel comes to power. They are ecstatic, meandering but also ambiguous epistles, in Hrabal’s incredibly compelling style.

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Annejet van der Zijl, The snowdrop forest

Never, ever, thought Annejet van der Zijl, would she leave Amsterdam behind her. Yet things turned out differently and she is now ‘simply happy on the dune, in the strip between the sea and civilization’. The landscape around Bergen is where she feels ‘the opposite of homesick’. In this new part of the beautiful Terloops series, she not only sings about the beauty of the dunes, her love of walking and having a dog, but she also weaves in a mourning story.