The Darkroom of Damocles

Book excerpt: By the acclaimed Dutch author of Beyond Sleep: a thriller set in Nazi occupied Holland: “fast-moving, frighteningly real yet verging on the incredible” (Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being). During the German occupation of Holland, tobacconist Henri Osewoudt is visited by a mysterious man named Dorbeck—a man who bears a strangely striking resemblance to Osewoudt himself. Dorbeck recruits him to perform simple, but top-secret missions on orders from London. But as the assignments keep coming, they get increasingly dangerous. Soon Osewoudt is being asked to commit murder in the name of Gestapo resistance. After the war, Osewoudt is taken for a traitor and captured. To prove his sacrifices for the Resistance, he must find the untraceable doppelgänger in an existential thriller “crackling with tension . . . bringing to mind Camus and the Sartre of Les Chemins de la Liberté” (The Telegraph). “Striking, suspenseful . . . Brilliant.” —The Observer