Molly Quell is a journalist who covers international justice for Courthouse News Service and is a contributing editor at Dutch News, including writing the site’s book reviews.
She spends pretty much all of the money she makes on books at the ABC. She enjoys reading those books on the couch with her dog.
During the Second World War, the Netherlands is still under Nazi control and any acts of resistance are punishable by death. But when sixteen-year-old Michiel is asked to take care of a wounded British Spitfire pilot he doesn't think twice. He joins the secret struggle against the Nazis, working every day to end the occupation and protect those in danger from it, knowing all the time that spies are everywhere and one loose word could cost him his life...
Twenty-three-year-old Frits – office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes – finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit. This is the story of ten evenings in Frits’s life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city streets and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him.
We are back with our 5(ish) favorite reads (and games) of 2024! We try very hard to keep it to five, but it’s simply not always possible. So, per staff member there may be more or less than five titles, but there can also be an A and a B list, memorable [...]
An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge - for readers of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan's Atonement. It's 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season . . .
What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them? This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.
With the winner of the International Booker Prize 2024 set to be announced in May, veteran Dutchnews book reviewer and ABC blog contributor Molly Quell dives into past Booker winner, Amsterdam. Click here to read how author McEwan wrote his award-winning novel, in his own words. [...]
Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp.
An extraordinary story about a Jewish woman who pretended to be Catholic to survive the Holocaust
