Cees Nooteboom

In Lost Paradise, Nooteboom sets out to connect two seemingly unrelated strangers whom he has glimpsed on his travels, and to explore the major impact that small interactions can have on the course of our journeys. A beautiful woman aboard a Berlin-bound flight becomes Alma, a young lady who leaves her parents' Sao Paolo home on a hot summer night in a fit of depression. Her car engine dies in one of the city's most dangerous favelas, a mob surrounds...

A writer of travel books, Herman Mussert, goes to bed one night in Amsterdam and wakes up in a Lisbon hotel in the very room where 20 years earlier he slept with another man's wife. Is he dead, or dreaming, or travelling backwards through time? A surrealistic tale by the author of The Knight Has Died.

A recently widowed Dutch filmmaker wanders the streets of Berlin, until he meets a mysterious Dutch-Berber woman named Elik.

Cees Nooteboom's distinctive narrative style has singled him out as one of the important voices of contemporary fiction. His work, which Michael Malone, writing in the New York Times Book Review, has compared to that of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges, frequently blurs the one between the real and the surreal. The Knight Has Died, Nooteboom's fifth novel to be published in the United States, was written in the early 1960s. Nooteboom had been called...

A man of independent means oddly suited to survival amid the chaos of modern life, Inni Wintrop is a committed dabbler, content to casually wander the streets of Amsterdam, follow the dips and rises of the stock exchange and commodities market, speculate in art and love, and write a newspaper horoscope column. But his inconsistencies are interrupted when he meets two men who are the epitome of order and regulation.