Niek Miedema Books

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

An acclaimed collection of stories from the internationally bestselling author of The Crimson Petal and the White

Twee novellen

1799, Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk, has a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city's powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken--the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob's worst imaginings.

A plane crashes on an uninhabited island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast.In this, his first novel, William Golding gave the traditional adventure story an ironic, devastating twist. The boys' delicate sense of order fades, and their childish fears are transformed into something deeper and more primitive. Their games take on a horrible significance, and before long the well-behaved party of schoolboys has turned into a tribe of faceless, murderous savages.First published in 1954, Lord of the Flies is now recognized as a classic, one of the most celebrated of all modern novels.

Jeo and Mikal, foster-brothers from a small Pakistani city, secretly enter Afghanistan: not to fight with the Taliban, but to help and care for wounded civilians. But it soon becomes apparent that good intentions can't keep them out of harm's way...

Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn’t matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren’t enough to make it through a life. Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry—though not the life—of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.

The Queen of England comes across a travelling library and ends up taking out a novel. One read leads to another and a passion awakes, resulting in a decline of her public duties.

Op een ochtend, vlak voor Kerstmis, nadat er een zware storm over Londen is geraasd, zoekt een oudere vrouw haar weg door de stad. Een ware sneeuwjacht van herinneringen aan de hoogte- en dieptepunten in haar leven trekt door haar hoofd, haar eens zo glansrijke carrière, de bijzondere momenten en zware beproevingen. Als jonge actrice krijgt Molly Allgood een verhouding met de zestien jaar oudere John Synge, de huisschrijver van het theater waaraan Molly is verbonden. Synge is een poëet die zich uit in onstuimige taal en wordt gedreven door stormachtige passies. Maar zijn leven wordt ingeperkt door de mores van zijn tijd en beheerst door zijn godvruchtige moeder. Molly is een opstandig, sensueel en levenslustig meisje dat ervan droomt te schitteren in Amerika. Ze heeft tientallen aanbidders op het toneel, maar achter de schermen heeft ze alleen oog voor haar minnaar John. Hun verhouding, die door vrienden en familie wordt afgekeurd, en tegengewerkt, kent een turbulent, soms wreed, maar ook dikwijls teder verloop. Volgspot is de geschiedenis van een tomeloze liefde, van scheiding en verzoening, en van de moed die nodig is om volstrekt voor eigen rekening te leven. Het is een diep ontroerende roman vol bruisende taal en onvergetelijke personages; een hommages aan het vertellen zelf.