"This is the highest kind of achievement of which fiction is capable. . . . Ranks with the finest European fiction of recent years."--The Christian Science Monitor

Uli Bouwmeester is a retired variety artiste who spends his days whiling away his time. Out of the blue, an invitation arrives to play the leading part in a new drama at the Actor's Theater in Amsterdam, and he is flung with a vengeance from the monotony of life in the suburbs into the reality of the 1980s. All goes well until a television crew arrives to interview Uli, revealing a secret from his past that threatens not...

The Discovery of Heaven, Harry Mulisch's magnum opus, is a rich mosaic of twentieth-century trauma in which many themes--friendship, loyalty, family, art, technology, religion, fate, good, and evil--suffuse a suspenseful and resplendent narrative.

The story begins with the meeting of Onno and Max, two complicated individuals whom fate has mysteriously and magically brought together. They share responsibility for the birth of a remarkable and radiant boy who embarks on a mandated quest that takes the reader all over Europe and to the land where all such quests begin and...

Internationally renowned novelist Harry Mulisch's The Procedure is a haunting and fascinating novel about two men who try to create life but fail. In the late sixteenth century, Rabbi Jehudah Low, in order to guarantee the safety of the Jews in Prague, creates a golem by following a procedure outlined in a third-century cabalist text. Four hundred years later, Victor Werker, a Dutch biologist mourning the loss of his stillborn daughter, causes an international uproar when he creates a complex organic clay crystal that can reproduce and has a metabolism. But his unsettling discovery...