Frans van der Wiel Book order (chronological)

From the author of Songdogs, a magnificent work of imagination and history set in the tunnels of New York City. In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Above ground, the sandhogs--black, white, Irish, Italian--keep their distance from each other until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow diggers--a bond that will bless and curse the next three generations. Years later, Treefrog, a homeless man driven below by a shameful secret, ures a punishing winter in his subway nest. In tones ranging from bleak to disturbingly funny, Treefrog recounts his strategies of survival--killing rats, scavenging for discarded soda cans, washing in the snow. Between Nathan Walker and Treefrog stretch seventy years of ill-fated loves and uninted crimes. In a triumph of plotting, the two stories fuse to form a tale of family, race, and redemption that is as bold and fabulous as New York City itself. In This Side of Brightness, Colum McCann confirms his place in the front ranks of modern writers.

Een FBI-agent jaagt op een sluipmoordenaar die het gemunt heeft op vertegenwoordigers van corrupte elites in de politiek en het bedrijfsleven. Gaandeweg zijn speurtocht twijfelt hij steeds meer of hij de moordenaar wel wil arresteren. Dit is het thema van de film Captives, die succesvol scenarioschrijver Daniel Bloom bezig is te schrijven om zijn eigen woede de maatschappij lucht te geven. Daniel raakt in de knel als hij beseft dat zijn wraakgevoelens ook te maken hebben met zijn eigen emotionele ontwikkeling, zijn huwelijk en de relatie met zijn zoon. Hij heeft veel verwaarloosd in zijn jacht op succes. Daniel zoekt steun bij een extravagante jonge rabbijn, die met drugs experimenteert, hem naar Israël stuurt en hem de weg probeert te wijzen naar een ander leven.

Chris is in his forties: bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. He s a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a prostitute into his car.Roza is Yugoslavian, recently moved to London.

While the economy of his small South American country collapses, President Veracruz joins his improbable populace of ex-soldiers, former guerillas, unfrocked priests and reformed - though by no means inactive - whores, in a bizarre search for sexual fulfillment. But for Cardinal Guzman, a man tormented by his own private demons, their stupendous, hedonistic fiestas represent the epicenter of all heresies. Heresies that must be challenged with a horrifying new inquisition destined to climax in a spectacular confrontation... The second part of a trilogy, following "The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Fiction.

Pingeland, zo noemt Dismas het rijke land, dat veel op Nederland lijkt en hem ooit als vluchteling gastvrij ontving. Sinds Blaatpan minister-president van Pingeland is voelt hij zich er steeds minder thuis. Het sociale klimaat wordt grimmiger, asielbeleid en terrorisme bepalen de politieke agenda. Dismas doet er vanuit zijn flat in een rustige buitenwijk ogenschijnlijk afstandelijk verslag van, maar in werkelijkheid gaat in hem de aanstichter schuil van een reeks van aanslagen. Voorbedachte daden is een sterk, met vaart geschreven verhaal waaruit koele woede spreekt, maar ook humor, egoïsme en mededogen.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2003 In The Master of Petersburg J. M. Coetzee dares to imagine the life of Dostoevsky. Set in 1869, when Dostoevsky was summoned from Germany to St Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, this novel is at once a compelling mystery steeped in the atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Russia and a brilliant and courageous meditation on authority and rebellion, art and imagination. Dostoevsky is seen obsessively following his stepson's ghost, trying to ascertain whether he was a suicide or a murder victim and whether he loved or despised his stepfather.

Ruth Patchett never thought of herself as particularly devilish. Rather the opposite in fact -- simply a tall, not terribly attractive woman living a quiet life as a wife and mother in a respectable suburb. But when she discovers that her husband is having a passionate affair with the lovely romantic novelist Mary Fisher, she is so seized by envy that she becomes truly diabolic. Within weeks she has burnt down the family home, collected the insurance, made love to the local drunk and embarked on a course of destruction and revenge. A blackly comic satire of the war of the sexes, LIFE AND LOVES OF A SHE DEVIL is the fantasy of the wronged woman made real.

Kitty Maule longs to be "totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful." She is instead clever, reticent, self-possessed, and striking. For years. Kitty has been tactfully courting her colleague Maurice Bishop, a detached, elegant English professor. Now, running out of patience, Kitty's amorous pursuit takes her from rancorous academic committee rooms and lecture halls to French cathedrals and Parisian rooming houses, from sittings with her dress-making grandmother to seances with a grandmotherly psychic. Touching, funny, and stylistically breathtaking, Providence is a brightly polished gem of romantic comedy.