The 10 best books of April according to the Literature editorial team of De Standaard

It has only now been translated By the sea (2001) is perhaps Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s most compelling novel. Saleh Omar, an elderly East African trader, is taken to a reception center together with other asylum seekers and left there in a building that most resembles a shed. He becomes ‘a file’, one that requires the attention of social workers and lawyers. Eventually he meets fellow countryman Latif Mahmud, who ended up in London as a young man and became a professor. They are both uprooted and exhausted, they know pain and loneliness. Gradually they come together to share their stories. Gurnah graciously supports his characters in accounting for their losses, without becoming smarmy, cynical or dramatic.

Meulenhoff, 368 pages.

Read the review here and read the interview with Abdulrazak Gurnah here, “It takes courage to say: what we are doing is wrong and I refuse to go along with it.”

Aeschylus is the oldest and most solemn of the three great Athenian tragic writers. Sophocles and Euripides, who offer more spectacle, come after him. Seven pieces by Aeschylus have been preserved, now translated by classicist, poet and anthologist Patrick Lateur. His masterful translation equals the original. Marble Greek has become fluid and clear, without the unruly metaphors and common language being thrown overboard.

Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 646 pages.

Read the review here.

Bart Moeyaert wrote his most personal book to date: Another life is a loving and honorable book about his mother, but also about how he struggled with his father and with his own coming of age. A beautiful book that also brought relief to the writer himself.

Private domain, 360 pages.

Read the interview with Bart Moeyaert here.

Two years after writer Salman Rushdie narrowly survived an attack in New York, he is recovering Knife a state of affairs. Knife goes to the essence. The book is a compelling, at times raw, clinical account of a life-and-death struggle, a self-portrait, a five-star book as the ultimate act of resistance. You will learn everything: Rushdie expert Filip Rogiers read the book and is deeply impressed.

Pluim, 216 pages.

Read the review here and read the interview with Salman Rushdie here, “I remain an atheist. I was not saved by angels, but by doctors.” Or listen here to DS Today in which Filip Rogiers talks about the book and the interview.

We don’t know how it all started, but we do know how it ends because that will be at the beginning of Beautiful already given away: a girl has died. How? To which? We hope to hear this from the maid of the house, who has been sitting on the talking chair from the very first lines, albeit behind a two-way mirror. The tragedy slowly unfolds, with the noisy protest of citizens challenging the gap between rich and poor in the background. Schoon is the first novel by Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán to be translated into Dutch.

Meulenhoff, 258 pages.

Read the review here.

How much truth is there in the foundations of the Christian faith? Writer and columnist Christophe Vekeman investigates this question To God, an inspiring account of his struggle with (dis)belief. As if in a fever dream, he describes the hesitation, shame, confusion and loneliness he experiences. For those who like to be carried away by their train of thought – full of hymns, psalms, visions, imaginary sermons and dialogues with musicians and writers – this religious coming of age heavenly reading.

Arbeiderspers, 272 pages.

Read the review here and read the interview with Christophe Vekeman and Kristien Hemmerechts here about their newfound faith, the church and experiences of God.

The American photographer Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) is considered a black-and-white genius, but the greatest street photographer ever also took tens of thousands of color images. In 2019, 425 color images were collected in the swirling Garry Winogrand: color. And now there is a tighter version of that book, supplemented with work never before shown: Winogrand Color. Through the faces and gestures of couples in love and day-tripping families, sun-bathing young people, introverted commuters, lost-looking loners and beautiful women, you get to know a country of both promise and disappointment, joy and fear, gluttony and emptiness, longing and rawness. despair.

Twin Palms, 176 pages.

Read the review here.

Yellowface, by Chinese-American Rebecca F. Kuang, starts as a novel, but gradually reads like a thriller. Celebrated bestselling author Athena Liu dies in front of her good friend and writer June Hayward. The latter steals Athena’s manuscript, a very good novel about the Chinese Labor Corps that fought for the British on the front lines during WWI. June, who never broke through with her books, publishes it under the pseudonym Juniper Song and the story becomes a worldwide hit. But it also raises a controversy: is it really up to a white author to tell this story? And how far will publishers go to feign diversity? Yellowface is a brutal satire that turns out to be a thriller as June becomes increasingly plagued by paranoia, internet trolls and Athena’s ghost that suddenly appears everywhere.

The House of Books, 320 pages.

Read the review here.

In the atmospheric picture book The cat walk by the Swedish illustrator and writer Sara Lundberg, an owner and a cat take turns guiding each other. During the first walk through the city they already argue and lose each other. The pictures movingly show how the owner waits endlessly for the cat, followed by the relief of finding her home. The cat then takes the lead on an exciting journey through nature. This story is an ode to the bond that a person and a pet can feel for each other and shows with colorful pictures how fun life can be when your cat is in charge.

Tiptoe, 64 pages.

Read the review here.

Erased is the best introduction to the work of the Belarusian writer Sasja Filipenko. In this book he describes a forgotten, dark piece of history based on the story of the fictional Tatyana Alekseevna who, at the age of 90, looks back on her time in the Soviet Union. During the war with Nazi Germany, she works for the NKID, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When she gets her hands on a list of prisoners of war with her husband’s name on it, she is faced with a devastating choice. Prisoners of war are considered defectors, she fears for her life and replaces his name with another. After the war, her fraud was exposed. The price she has to pay is high.

Meridian, 280 pages.

Read the review here and read the interview with Sasja Filipenko here.