Written from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother, Marcel is a striking debut novel describing the vivid history of a family in a Flemish village. The mysterious death of Marcel, the family favourite, has always haunted the young boy. With the help of his schoolteacher, he starts to discover the secrets of Marcel’s ‘black’ past. The story of his death on the Eastern Front for the sake of Flanders, and the shame this brought upon his family gradually become clear. Erwin Mortier unravels this shameful family past in an unusually sensitive and evocative manner

My Fellow Skin is a beautiful, affectionate novel told from the point of view of an impressionable young boy. The novel opens before the boy can talk, and we follow Anton’s first, tentative steps on the path to adulthood. He gradually begins to grasp an understanding of time and death, and when he goes to school he falls in love for the first time — not with the schoolgirls his peers are interested in, but with his classmate, Willem. A gentle, protective relationship develops between them, and this gives Anton his own, new identity, his ‘fellow skin’. But their love ends tragically, and Anton ultimately loses not only his love, but also his youth, the protection of his parents, and the old house in the village. He is left desolate

A wonderful, balanced novel about how the remains of the past reverberate in the present, Shutterspeed sensitively and delicately describes the powerful emotions which lie just beneath the surface of the unruffled sheen of village life. Joris’ father died young, and his mother moved to Spain, so he has lived with his aunt and uncle since early childhood. He is quiet and introverted, and his aunt and uncle fear that he harbours a deep resentment for the loss of his parents. The gentle pace of life in the village is suddenly disturbed when a decision is made to remove the cemetery in the centre. For the boy, this awakens various emotionally charged memories of his dead father. The books ends with the death of the boy’s foster parents, marking a definitive end to his youth

What makes me saddest, is the double silence of her being. Language has packed its bags and jumped over the railing of the capsizing ship, but there is also another silence in her or around her. I can no longer hear the music of her soul.' One day, the author's mother no longer remembers the word for 'book'. This seemingly innocuous moment of distraction is the first sign of the slow disintegration of her mind. As Alzheimer's disease sets in and language increasingly escapes her, her son attempts to gather the fragments of what she has become, writing a moving, loving chronicle of the gradual descent into dementia of someone who 'no longer knows who she is, where she is or what will happen

While the Gods Were Sleeping is a novel about the magnitude and impact of the First World War, the recollections of which are recorded in the notebooks of the elderly Helena. The young Helena is sent to her uncle’s country house before the war, and from here she witnesses scenes of indescribable horror. But it is also where she meets Matthew again, a British Army photographer who she goes on to marry. This is a story not about spectacular events; rather, Mortier is concerned with writing about war, history and the past with great empathy and engagement, and with a mixture of melancholy, qualification and resignation