100 Best Dutch Books of All Time

Joe Lycett

guys i just read this book called harry potter well worth checking out it’s about a really interesting magic lad [source]

Maude Garrett

@GeekBomb Best use of time travel in a book or series to date [source]

Shami Chakrabarti

It’s all about the War on Terror as far as I’m concerned. [source]

Big Structural Change

@siriusclaw Azkaban ftw! Goblet is the worst of the series. Great book though. [source]

Sophie Roell

Set in the Netherlands during World War II, it’s about a young boy and the things he gets up to during the German occupation. Jan Terlouw, now in his 80s, based it partly on his own experiences, but the book has all the nice plot twists you expect from fiction. Also, as a children’s book written nearly half a century ago about a period of Dutch history that the country still struggles to come to terms with, I thought it might be a bit black-and-white: but it actually isn’t. [source]

Alison Alvarez

What I really took with me from the book were the descriptions of how she dealt with the stress of solitary confinement and eventually the Ravensbruck concentration camp. I adapted some of her techniques for keeping her mind occupied to deal with my own problems with anxiety and worry. Also, it’s a book with a surprising amount of joy in it for subject matter that is so dark. [source]

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

The classic story of Matilda who gets magical powers from reading books. [source]

Ian Buruma

In a way this is a bit like Passage to India, although it was written earlier, at the very beginning of the 20th century. It’s a very early example of a novelist who saw the futility of colonialism, and how a small number of Europeans – in this case the Dutch rulers of the Dutch East Indies – thought they knew what they were doing. Like Forster, he’s not being polemical. But he does describe, very sympathetically, the illusion the Europeans had that they would control these countries forever. Even then they didn’t have as much control as they thought. The story is about the wife of a Dutch colonial civil servant who has an adulterous affair, and she’s punished in a sort of supernatural way by visitations. Sexually it’s an extraordinarily explicit book, certainly for its time. There is a whole depth to the culture of the Dutch East Indies which the Europeans barely understood if at all, and that was undermining their sense of omnipotence everyday. This is associated with certain supernatural occurences, which Couperus uses as a metaphor for a whole world that the West simply didn’t see or know existed. That’s the hidden force. It’s about the illusion of Western omnipotence. [source]

Neal O'Gorman

Certainly, a previous non-business book which I really enjoyed (along with many other people) was the Da Vinci Code. I was living in the States at the time, and it was a rare occasion to be on a plane and not see someone reading it. [source]

Mary Burkey

When a celebrity narrator can disappear into the book, that’s when it belongs on that small shelf of truly amazing celebrity narrators. And that’s what Tom Hanks does in The Dutch House. [source]

Philippe Legrain

This is a fantastic book. It’s by a Dutch journalist and writer who spent a whole year — 1999 — travelling around Europe. He weaves together the history of Europe with modern cultural observations. It’s fascinating, both in terms of how Europe’s history remains alive today, but also how much has changed. So he starts off in Amsterdam, which is his native city, and then goes off to Paris, which is where the World Fair of 1900 captured the excitement of the new century. At the end of his journey, he ends up in Sarajevo, which played a crucial role in 1914, but at the time, in 1999, had just come out of the terrible Bosnian war. [source]

Martin Conway

Yes, this is a novel that works well in all three languages. It was written in Flemish Dutch. It’s full of Flemish slang and not easily readable—I would suggest—by some people from the Netherlands because it contains quite a lot of loan words from other languages and is full of dialect. Claus was a rather crazy, disorganised 1960s figure, but certainly saw himself as an intellectual. Above all, he saw himself, as many Belgian writers have done, as somebody who had escaped the suffocation of his upbringing by running away to Paris (Georges Simenon might be a similar case). [source]