Fall, Bomb, Fall

Seventeen-year-old Karel has been dreaming for something, anything, to shake up his humdrum existence. Soon his wish will be granted .

The last year or so has been a remarkable time for Dutch literature. First, the reissue of The Assault by Harry Mulisch, then Yael van der Wouden's The Safe Keep and now the publication in English of Fall, Bomb, Fall by Gerrit Kouwenaar. All three are haunting novels about the Dutch experience of the Second World War told from the perspective of young people

'The portrayal of seventeen-year-old Karel Ruis, emerging into adulthood as the adult world collapses around him, is as tender and complicated as a Rembrandt portrait... Warm, funny, devastating. Kouwenaar captures your heart then cracks it like a nut.'

'An intense and oppressively topical text that also reflects the wars of the present'

'Through sensitive precision, tender humour and the sharp drawing of merciless fate, Kouwenaar shows what it means when war breaks out'

GERRIT KOUWENAAR (1923-2014) was one of the giants of Dutch post-war literature. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands he wrote his first poetry collections and worked for the illegal literary magazine Parade der Profeten. He was arrested for his writing in 1944 and spent six months in prison, after which he went into hiding. Fall, Bomb, Fall, published in 1950 when Kouwenaar was just 23, was his first novel and is partly based on his experiences under Nazi occupation. After the war he first received widespread acclaim as a poet. His work won all the major literature prizes in the Netherlands, including the Dutch Literature Prize for his entire oeuvre. MICHELE HUTCHISON is a British translator from Dutch and French, editor and writer based in the Netherlands. She has translated more than 50 books of various genres. She won the 2019 Vondel Translation Prize for Stage Four by Sander Kollaard and shared both the 2020 International Booker Prize and the 2025 James Tait Black Memorial Prize with Lucas Rijneveld for The Discomfort of Evening and My Heavenly Favourite respectively. Her translation of The Philosopher, the Dog and the Wedding by Barbara Stok won the inaugural Sophie Castille Award in 2023.