The Convert

A brilliant reconstruction of an incredible journey across middle ages Europe to Egypt, and an untold story of forbidden love.

Enthralling... A spectacular tale told with spectacular accomplishment

[An] astonishing tale… The main narrative is told in a pressing, insistent present tense and Hertmans conjures up the medieval world with the same sensuous detailing that was so effective in War and Turpentine… tense and compelling… The Covert is…extraordinarily good

An imaginative flight, full of darkness and light, lively characters, life-altering conflicts, violence and kindness

Written in an often breathless, continuous present tense, Hamoutal’s experiences are visualised following Herman’s own groudbreaking researches… David McKay’s translation is as brilliant as it is frequently brutal, and intermittently lyrical

Nearly a millennium later, Hamoutal has been remembered and honored

Stefan Hertmans (Author) 
Stefan Hertmans is the prizewinning author of many literary works, including poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories and a handbook on the history of art. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, at the Sorbonne, and at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. His first novel to be translated into English, War and Turpentine, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and was chosen as a book of the year in The Times, Sunday Times, and The Economist, and as one of the ten best books of the year in the New York Times.

A brilliant reconstruction of an incredible journey across medieval Europe to Egypt, and an untold story of forbidden love. 
 
'Enthralling... A spectacular tale told with spectacular accomplishment' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
In the small village in Provence where Stefan Hertmans has made his home, people have long spoken of an ancient pogrom and hidden treasure. Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, an extraordinary collection of Jewish documents was found in a synagogue in Cairo. 
 
Hertmans has based The Convert on these historical sources, tracing the life of a young Christian noblewoman who abandoned everything for the love of a rabbi's son. In this startlingly contemporary novel, Hertmans follows in her footsteps as the lovers flee through France together, pursued by crusading knights, and recounts her dazzling journey full of love and hardship, courage and hate, as she travels on towards Jerusalem alone. 
 
Jewish National Book Awards 2020 Finalist

War and Turpentine

A set of notebooks, left unopened for thirty years, leads to a personal story of love, war and art, for fans of W.G. Sebald and Pat Barker

War and Turpentine is the astonishing result of Hertmans’ reckoning with his grandfather’s diaries. It is a book that lies at the crossroads of novel, biography, autobiography and history… It seems aching to be called 'Sebaldian', and earns the epithet glowingly… In McKay’s lyrical translation, every detail has the heightened luminosity of poetry… War and Turpentine has all the marking of a future classic.

Staggering richness of language; brutal, deep, haunting. Mesmerising from page one... If you think you’ve had enough of the muddy gore of Flanders Fields, believe me you haven’t, not until you’ve read this book.

Masterpiece, an accolade often casually bestowed, really does describe this magnificent book… A haunting blend of fact and fiction… Page after page holds you rapt with admiration for both Hertmans' writing and his hero.

Hertmans writes with an eloquence reminiscent of W.G. Sebald... a masterly book about memory, art, love and war.

A lovingly reimagined life of an ordinary man whose life was for ever marked by the First World War. Fine prose.

Wonderful, full of astonishingly vivid moments of powerful imagery… Hertmans’s book is something else again: it has a quietly resonant personal epic quality that dwarfs all around it.

Skilful and lyrical reconstruction of a life transformed by war, love and art… It is not often a book succeeds on many levels, but War and Turpentine manages to be a mesmerising portrait of an artist as a young man, a significant contribution to First World War literature and a brilliant evocation of a vanished world.

Hertmans follows in his grandfather’s footsteps in this brilliant and moving imagined reconstruction, his imagination beautifully filling the gaps as he describes “the battle between the transcendent, which he yearned for, and the memory of death and destruction, which held him in its clutches.”

A masterly treatise on the interconnections of life, art, memory, and heartbreaking love...Hertmans’s prose, with a deft translation from McKay, works with the same full palette as Urbain Martien’s paintings: vivid, passionate—and in the end, life-affirming.

War and Turpentine is an exquisite, loving reconstruction of a man’s interior life, at once deeply personal and yet so evocative of many of his generation, affected by the long shadow of war. In beautiful, glimmering prose, Hertmans shows us how our experiences shape us all, and how, even in a life of sorrow and heartache, dignity can be found.

Superb… The central section, which descrives life in the trenches in the First World War and the story of a lost love, is especially evocative

Affecting and unusual… Hertman’s first-person construction evokes the brutality of the trenches but also their monotony... But the majority of War and Turpentine is not set in wartime, and deals with remembrance of a different sort. It is the soft edges of history, memory and creation that are its true subject… The heart of the book is a masterly portrait of a man’s grief over lost love and his commemoration of it in art.

Stefan Hertmans (Author) Stefan Hertmans is the prizewinning author of many literary works, including poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories and a handbook on the history of art. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, at the Sorbonne, and at the Universities of Vienna and Berlin. His first novel to be translated into English, War and Turpentine, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and was chosen as a book of the year in The Times, Sunday Times, and The Economist, and as one of the ten best books of the year in the New York Times.

WINNER OF THE VONDEL PRIZE 2017 
 
 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 
 
 Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 in the New York Times 
 
Shortly before his death, Stefan Hertmans' grandfather Urbain Martien gave his grandson a set of notebooks containing the detailed memories of his life. He grew up in poverty around 1900, the son of a struggling church painter who died young, and went to work in an iron foundry at only 13. Afternoons spent with his father at work on a church fresco were Urbain’s heaven; the iron foundry an inferno. 
 
During the First World War, Urbain was on the front line confronting the invading Germans, and ever after he is haunted by events he can never forget. The war ends and he marries his great love, Maria Emelia, but she dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic. Urbain mourns her bitterly for the rest of his life but, like the obedient soldier he is, he marries her sister at her parents' bidding. The rest is not quite silence, but a marriage with a sad secret at its heart, and the consolations found in art and painting. War and Turpentine is the imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century; a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war.

Stefan Hertmans

David McKay

A house can have many secrets

The dazzling new novel by Stefan Hertmans, author of the modern classic War and Turpentine. 
 
'Magnificent' Philippe Sands 
'Powerful and humane' Observer 
'An utterly masterly book' Jonathan Coe 
 
In 1979, Stefan Hertmans fell in love with a dilapidated old house in Ghent, Belgium, which he restored to become his peaceful sanctuary. Now, all these years later, he learns that a bust of Hitler once sat on the mantelpiece, and a war criminal and his family relaxed in its rooms. 
 
This shocking discovery sends Hertmans off to the archives, to uncover the secrets of the house and to reimagine this man's life and expose the atrocities he's responsible for. We see Willem Verhulst as a weak, narcissistic man who climbed high in the ranks of the SS; a fascinating case study for the cruel and perverse mentality of the Nazis. 
 
The Ascent portrays the deep tragedy of Flemish collaboration during the Second World War, as Hertmans masterfully brings history and the house to life, imagining individual lives to tell the greater European story. 
 
Translated from the Dutch by David McKay

Stefan Hertmans

The Ascent

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