The Foxes Come at Night

Description

Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come at Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. And yet the tone of these stories is far from pessimistic: it seems that death is nothing to be afraid of.

Cees Nooteboom was born in The Hague in 1933, and now lives in Amsterdam and on the island of Minorca. He is a poet, a novelist and a travel writer whose books include Rituals (1983), The Following Story (1994), Roads to Santiago (1997) and All Souls' Day (2001). Ina Rilke is the translator of books by W. F. Hermans, Erwin Mortier, Tessa de Loo, Dai Sijie, Margriet de Moor and Arthur Japin. She has been awarded the Vondel Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Flemish Culture Prize for Translation.

'Both wise and beautiful' John de Falbe, Literary Review. * Literary Review * 'Exquisite toys for the broken-hearted' Jonathan Gibbs, Independent. * Independent * 'Nooteboom is full of surprises and makes every word, every observation, not only count but also linger' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times. * Irish Times * 'I much admired Cees Nooteboom's sharply melancholy stories' Julian Barnes, TLS Books of the Year. * Books of the Year * 'One of the most remarkable writers of our time' Alberto Manguel, Guardian. * Guardian * 'Poignant, wistful, and sometimes bitingly funny studies of memory, longing, regret, and a wry acceptance that this is what being alive is like' Independent on Sunday. * Independent on Sunday *