Seven books by writers from Belgium, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with War and Turpentine and The Sorrow of Belgium.
The Ghent-born playwright Maurice Maeterlinck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, and his fairy-tale play The Blue Bird remains his best-known work. Belgian writers work mainly in French and Dutch. Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte, published in 1892, is the classic Symbolist portrait of Bruges, with a widower's grief set among canals and church bells. Georges Simenon, better known for his Maigret detective novels, drew on his own Liège childhood in Pedigree.
Several Dutch-language novels return to the two world wars. Hugo Claus's The Sorrow of Belgium shows a Flemish boy growing up in a Catholic family during the Second World War, with collaboration and its aftermath in the background. Stefan Hertmans's War and Turpentine draws on his grandfather's notebooks to portray a Ghent painter's working-class youth and his First World War experience.
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Based on the author's grandfather's notebooks, it follows a Ghent painter's working-class youth and his First World War experience on the Belgian front.
A Flemish boy grows up in a Catholic, provincial family in Flanders during the Second World War, with collaboration and its aftermath.
A darkly comic memoir-style novel about a boozy, chaotic working-class family in a small Flemish town.
A widower's grief plays out among the canals, beguinages and church bells of Bruges, the classic Symbolist portrait of the city.
An autobiographical novel of a lower-middle-class Liège childhood, set before and during the First World War.
A Gothic story set in a remote village in the Belgian borderlands between the wars, on the edge of the German-speaking area.
A Ghent schoolteacher's obsession unfolds in a Flemish city, in a classic of Flemish magic realism.
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