In Babylon

Winner of two major European prizes, this funny, quirky chronicle of a family of Dutch clockmakers is a bestseller in the Netherlands.

Sixty-year-old Nathan Hollander is stranded in a winter blizzard with his young niece, Nina, in the deserted house of his late Uncle Herman. As they wait for the weather to improve, Nathan tells Nina the story of their forefathers – a family of clockmakers who came to the Netherlands from Eastern Europe and then emigrated to America before WWII. An extraordinary and rich family history emerges.

An epic family saga, a Gothic novel gone haywire, a very human story and a chronicle of the twentieth century, In Babylon is already set to be a classic European novel. A piece of very solid, traditional storytelling combined with a very funny, sensual magical realism. A brilliant merging of the lightness of popular American writing and the depth of European literature.

Holland’s most famous author, Marcel Möring, was born in 1957 in Enschede, and he now lives in Rotterdam. He decided to become a writer at the age of thirteen.

After studying Dutch literature for two years and writing and directing plays, Möring published his aclaimed first novel, ‘Mendels Erfenis’ in 1990. His second, ‘Het Grote Verlangen’ (‘The Great Longing’) won the AKO Prize, the Dutch equivalent of the Booker Prize, and sold over 100,000 copies in the Netherlands alone.