‘Warm, funny, devastating. Kouwenaar captures your heart then cracks it like a nut’ Alice Chadwick, author of Dark Like Under
Seventeen-year-old Karel has been dreaming for something, anything, to shake up his humdrum existence. Soon his wish will be granted?.????
When Hitler launches an invasion of the Netherlands,?? Karel ?is almost killed in an air raid and falls in love for the first time, with a Jewish girl. But the bliss this passion brings is short lived, as his new love and her mother are forced to flee for their lives before the Nazi advance…
Inspired partly by Kouwenaar’s own experiences under occupation, this rediscovered literary gem tells a heart-breaking, witty and deeply empathetic story of a teenager’s coming-of-age at the outbreak of war.
Reviews
The last year or so has been a remarkable time for Dutch literature. First, the reissue of The Assault by Harry Mulisch, then Yael van der Wouden’s The Safe Keep and now the publication in English of Fall, Bomb, Fall by Gerrit Kouwenaar. All three are haunting novels about the Dutch experience of the Second World War told from the perspective of young people
Jewish Chronicle
‘The portrayal of seventeen-year-old Karel Ruis, emerging into adulthood as the adult world collapses around him, is as tender and complicated as a Rembrandt portrait… Warm, funny, devastating. Kouwenaar captures your heart then cracks it like a nut.’
‘An intense and oppressively topical text that also reflects the wars of the present’
Swiss Radio and Television
‘Through sensitive precision, tender humour and the sharp drawing of merciless fate, Kouwenaar shows what it means when war breaks out’
Münchner Merkur
