All Souls Day — Cees Nooteboom

A brilliant new novel-evocative and philosophical, poetic and passionate.

A Dutch documentary filmmaker finds himself in Berlin at the end of the twentieth century, trying to make sense of his own past in a city where every stone bears traces of history. Having lost his wife and child in an airplane crash, he is still coming to terms with the grief, trying to build a new life amid a group of cosmopolitan, splendidly eccentric friends. As he walks the streets of a recently reunified Berlin city, shooting scenes for a film with as yet vague shape, Daane seeks to make a coherent picture of fragments of memory and history. When by chance he meets a mysterious young Dutch-Berber woman named Elik, these rather abstract questions suddenly take on far more concrete shape, and soon Daane follows Elik to Madrid and the novel's stunning denouement.

All Souls Day is both a love story and a reflection on the way history plays with our lives. It is an extraordinary achievement.