From Huntington to Babylon: the 7 books you definitely want to read in April

Babylon

Yasmina Reza

With her novel Babylon Yasmina Reza won the prix Renaudot, France's most important literary prize after the prix Goncourt. The main character is 62-year-old Elisabeth Jauze. Elisabeth is a patent examiner at the Institute Pasteur and leads a sedate life with her husband Pierre. Unlike her sister Jeanne, who, since divorce, gets into sexual adventures that are not all healthy for her, Elisabeth's life is orderly and safe. But this changes when Jean-Lino, the neighbour she befriends, kills his wife at night after her birthday party. Babylon is a novel about free will and moral choices, and what you make of life by doing so. A novel that reverberates in your head longer than expected, with characters that stay with you.
(The Bezige Bij)

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The womb

Dick Schoot and Wim Daniëls

A book about the womb - do you want to read it? Yes, and you should, think Dick Schoot and Wim Daniëls, because after all, no human being comes into the world without having first spent some nine months in the female womb. Yet most - even pregnant women - know very little about the womb. In their lucid and interesting book The womb they tell everything there is to know about the place where man comes to life.
(Prometheus)

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We didn't think about dying

Gerda Blees

Ten stories counts We didn't think about dying by Gerda Blees, and in her debut she shows herself to be a good narrator who is clearly in control. Her characters try to escape their situations, sometimes doing wrong things or making wrong decisions in the process. Guilt and innocence are not always black and white, and Blees registers rather than gives an opinion in her surprising stories.
(Podium)

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Hello white people

Anousha Nzume

It is a subject the average Dutchman prefers to turn away from: intended and unintended racism. In Hello white people Anousha Nzume speaks directly to her - white - readers, pulling back the veil on our supposed tolerance - a word that in itself does not convey equality. Her observations will bring the red to the cheeks of many, or in a worse case encounter resistance and irritation. An honest book that required courage from the author and courage from the reader to truly face the situation.(Amsterdam University Press)

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I was Escobar's wife

Virginia Vallejo

She was quite a golddigger, but fascinating it is, the story Virginia Vallejo chronicled in I was Escobar's wife. She tells how, as a young woman, she became acquainted with Pablo Escobar, who would then become Colombia's biggest drug lord. Handsome he was not, yet he exerted a great attraction on her - and she on him. That both their passionate natures easily turn into the opposite is obvious from the outset, but it is still fascinating to get a glimpse into an environment that, as an 'ordinary' person, you can only get a picture of through a television series.
(Xander)

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Huntington's Hell

Renske Schut

Until this book, I had never heard of Huntington's disease. And exactly that is the problem: the people who have it are silent about it; the rest of the country does not know about it. But who Huntington's Hell reads, in which journalist Renske Schut has chronicled the story of 45-year-old Joyce van Blerck, is sure that it is perhaps one of the worst things that can happen to a person. Huntington's is a combination of Alzheimer's, ALS and Parkinson's, and people who get it seriously deteriorate physically and mentally. Joyce was diagnosed when she was in her mid-thirties and soon noticed the first symptoms. A cure is within reach, but the unknown nature of the disease does not help. Proceeds from the book go partly to Huntington's research.
(Argentum)

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Corpse exhibition

Hassan Blasim

As the collection of stories Corpse exhibition of Hassan Blasim makes something clear, it is this: we Westerners can't really imagine much of the horrors people have to endure in Iraq or similar countries. Blasim's fantasy is as sinister and terrifying as it is fascinating; for instance, a wolf suddenly turns up in a flat, forcing its occupant to take refuge in the toilet. In the story from which the collection takes its name, dead people are stuffed and put on display in the city. Fantasy and reality are not so far apart in the dark world Blasim shows us, which is unfortunately daily reality for so many in this world. A collection that is humbling.
(Publisher Jurgen Maas)

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