The Longest Night

Since the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945, Emma Verweij has been living in Rotterdam, on a street held together by the powerful bonds of friendship formed among neighbors during the Second World War. She has worked hard to block out the war years she spent in Nazi Berlin, when she was married to her first husband, Carl. Eventually, Emma married Bruno, her second husband, and they had two sons together.

Now ninety-six years old and on the eve of her own death, Emma is besieged by long-forgotten memories that crowd into her consciousness despite their long banishment, along with flashbacks of happier years and of the terrible tragedy of the war. She reflects on her marriage to Carl, a “good” German who resisted the Third Reich and paid the ultimate price for it; her father, a Dutch diplomat who secretly worked to help refugees escape the Nazis and to supply the British intelligence service with critical information; and the many friends she has lost, during the war and since.

In The Longest Night, the impressive, reflective follow-up to News from Berlin (described by the Guardian as “restrained and monumental”), Otto de Kat deftly distills the momentous events of twentieth-century history into the lives of his characters. In the person of Emma, the past and the present coincide in soulful fragments of rare, melancholy beauty.