The Convert

'The Convert, briskly translated from the Dutch by David McKay, is an imaginative flight, full of darkness and light, lively characters, life-altering conflicts, violence and kindness, birth, death and, oddly, a lot of snakes. It is, as it says right there on the cover, nothing less than a novel. And it's a really good one.' * New York Times * 'The Convert involves meticulous research and carefully detailed prose, binding together a fascinating historical story...[Stefan Hertmans] has again produced an immensely fine work, which is as affecting as it is tragic.' * Otago Daily Times * 'This is a novel to recommend to poets, historians, gardeners and crafters; to those who know well that the reward is not solely in conclusion, but also in the unfolding interim.' * Canberra Times * 'Hertmans travels the road trod by Vigdis and brings to life the hardships she endured along the way, all the whole intertwining his own journey of discovery.' * Herald Sun * 'A masterly treatise on the interconnections of life, art, memory, and heartbreaking love...Hertmans's prose, with a deft translation from McKay, works with the same full palette as Urbain Martien's paintings: vivid, passionate-and in the end, life-affirming.' * Publishers Weekly on War and Turpentine * '[Hertmans] recreates the lives and losses of the deceased with enormous empathy and skill...Like many family dramas, this is a work that veers between sense and sentimentality. It is in many ways an old-fashioned book, and pleasingly so...It is sympathetic remembrance, shaped into lasting elegy.' * The Australian on War and Turpentine * 'Every detail has the heightened luminosity of poetry...The book has such convincing density of detail, with the quiddities of a particular life so truthfully rendered, that I was reminded of a phrase from Middlemarch: an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects . Hertmans' achievement is exactly that...War and Turpentine has all the markings of a future classic.' * Guardian on War and Turpentine * 'A gritty yet melancholy account of war and memory and art that may remind some readers of the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald...Urbain Martien was a man of another time. This serious and dignified book is old-fashioned, too, in the pleasant sense that it seems built to last.' * New York Times on War and Turpentine *