Marcel :

The narrator is a ten year old boy who lives with his grandparents in a Flemish village. His grandmother guards the family dead with fierce determination, arranging and re-arranging their photographs in a special cabinet, talking to them and arguing with them. The cabinet is an extension of heaven, with its own purgatory and hell: their place in his grandmother's favour is marked by their proximity to a statue of the Blessed Virgin. But, one image is always next to the Virgin: Marcel, who died young, far away and for whom there is no grave. How did he die? His laughing eyes, staring out from a face already obliterated by the sun, give nothing away. Only when the boy uncovers letters that hint at a hidden past, does he decide to learn who Marcel was, and why the circumstances of his death remain so painful.

Erwin Mortier was born in Flanders in 1965. Marcel, his debut novel, has won numerous literary prizes in the Netherlands and Flanders and acclaim throughout Europe. He works in Ghent at the Museum of the History of Psychiatry and as a journalist.