The dazzling new novel by Stefan Hertmans, author of the modern classic War and Turpentine.

‘A powerful and humane reminder that the horrors of the past century are inexhaustibly fascinating and reverberate today.’ Observer

In 1979, Stefan Hertmans fell in love with a beautiful dilapidated old house in Ghent in Belgium, which he lovingly rescued from decay, as it became his peaceful sanctuary. Now, all these years later, he learns that a bust of Hitler once sat on the mantelpiece, and a war criminal relaxed in its rooms with his family.

This shocking discovery sends Hertmans off to the archives and to interview next of kin, to uncover the secrets of the house and reimagine this man’s life and expose the atrocities he’s responsible for. We see Willem Verhulst as a weak, narcissistic man who climbed high in the ranks of the SS; a fascinating and chilling case study for the cruel and perverse mentality of the Nazis.

A story of war, family, and individual fate, The Ascent portrays the deep tragedy of Flemish collaboration during World War Two. Hertmans masterfully brings history and the house to life, as he appears in the novel as a trusted guide, and imagines individual lives to tell the greater European story.

Translated from the Dutch by David McKay

Praise for War and Turpentine

‘All the marking of a future classic.’ Neel Mukherjee, Guardian

‘Staggering richness of language. Mesmerising from page one’. Simon Schama

‘Masterpiece, an accolade often casually bestowed, really does describe this magnificent book.’ Sunday Times, Book of the Year

‘A masterly book.’ New York Times, 10 Best Books of the Year

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE

Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 in the New York Times

Shortly before his death, Stefan Hertmans’ grandfather Urbain Martien gave his grandson a set of notebooks containing the detailed memories of his life. He grew up in poverty around 1900, the son of a struggling church painter who died young, and went to work in an iron foundry at only 13. Afternoons spent with his father at work on a church fresco were Urbain’s heaven; the iron foundry an inferno.

During the First World War, Urbain was on the front line confronting the invading Germans, and ever after he is haunted by events he can never forget. The war ends and he marries his great love, Maria Emelia, but she dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic. Urbain mourns her bitterly for the rest of his life but, like the obedient soldier he is, he marries her sister at her parents’ bidding. The rest is not quite silence, but a marriage with a sad secret at its heart, and the consolations found in art and painting. War and Turpentine is the imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century; a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war.