Benny Lindelauf

Hele verhalen voor een halve soldaat

John Nieuwenhuizen

An intriguing novel with a classic feel, featuring three vividly alive young sisters, an eccentric family struggling against the odds, and the slowly revealed story of a house with a past.

Nine Open Arms

When the Boon family moves into an old, ramshackle house at the very edge of a small town in the Netherlands, Oma Mei, the grandmother of seven motherless children, relates the house's remarkable origin in the 1860s.

Fing Boon (ik-figuur), dochter uit een groot, arm eenoudergezin in Zuid-Limburg, kan goed leren. Toch moet ze aan het werk bij een rijke familie. Als de oorlog uitbreekt, wordt het gezin Boon hard getroffen. Vanaf ca. 13 jaar.

De hemel van Heivisj

A spectacularly illustrated story about war and friendship. Tortot is a cold-hearted field cook who goes off to war. Soldiers drop like flies around him but Tortot just doesn't care. Until, that is, he finds a deserter in his kitchen: a boy who has lost his brothers and his legs in battle. Tortot feels no real sympathy for him, but decides to shelter him for one night. It's a decision that will change him for ever...

Tortot, The Cold Fish Who Lost His World and Found His Heart

At the end of the world, near the border with Germany, stands a house as long as nine open arms. Half hidden behind trees and shrubs rises a wide brick wall, topped with two attic windows, each no bigger than a dishcloth. The walls have been whitewashed and the wooden floor is bare, as if the house is waiting. Waiting for someone to move in. It is the summer of 1937, and it hasn't rained for seven weeks when eleven - year - old Fing and her family of nine move into Nine Open Arms, along with their handcart of meagre belongings. 'The Dad' is a man who does all kinds of jobs and none of them well, while Oma Mei courageously holds everything together, including the family's history in her Crocodile bag full of pictures and stories. But as the year progresses, the family just gets poorer. Meanwhile, Fing and her two sisters, wild Muulke and fearful Jess, begin to discover strange mysteries...a bed that looks like a tombstone, an unmarked grave in the cemetery...until at last the story of those who came before begins slowly to emerge. In the end, Fing learns that love and stories are her family's wealth. Nine Open Arms is an exceptional imagined historical mystery - the story of a very special home, the eccentric families who have lived within it, and the unexpected ties that emerge between the two... 'Written with great warmth, love of life, and infectious humour.' (De Morgen - Flemish newspaper) Translated by John Nieuwenhuizen.

Drie zusjes verhuizen met hun vader, oma en vier broers voor de zoveelste keer. In hun nieuwe huis ontdekken ze een graf in de kelder dat iets te maken heeft met hun eigen familiegeschiedenis. Vanaf ca. 11 jaar.

Negen Open Armen

The Boon family and their indefatigable gallows humor are back in Benny Lindelauf's follow-up to Nine Open Arms. Poised to win a scholarship to the nearby teachers college, Fing has high hopes. It's 1938 and her poor family of nine--one father, four brothers, three sisters, and a grandmother--has finally managed to eke out a living in the tiny cigar factory abutting their dilapidated home. But smelling success, her dreamer of a father is determined to expand and Fing's dreams fall apart when she instead has to go to work for the Cigar Emperor, taking care of his new, German wife's eccentric niece. The novel's gripping language, enriched by Yiddish, German, and Dutch dialect, plunges the reader into the world of a large, colorful, motherless family as they navigate the changes World War II visits upon their little town on the border of the Netherlands and Germany. This stand-alone follow-up to Nine Open Arms, a 2015 Batchelder Honor book translated from Dutch, is a fantasy, a historical novel, and literary fiction all wrapped into one.

Benny Lindelauf

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