The great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon began his life s work with this extraordinary novel, a story of World War II as seen through the unglamorous, uncourageous, unhistorical eyes of the man on the street. Frustrated with the dainty, straightforward, neatly chronological narratives that dominated[...]

This is a wide-ranging portrait of life in an increasingly de-personalised world. This, the author writes, is "the novel of the individual in a world of barbarians." This is the story of Ondine and Oscarke, a young married couple adrift in a Belgian landscape that is darkening under the spread of in[...]