Read our sample translation of A Family Walk
About the book
Four years ago, Marcel Möring returned to the northern Netherlands, where he had grown up. Wandering through the forest and fields, memories returned to him there that seemed far away and deeply hidden. Now, more than half a century later, he can still – somewhere between waking and dreams – walk to his mother’s adopted parents, who had hidden her during the war. In 1945 his mother had chosen to stay with them instead of returning to Rotterdam, her city of birth. ‘It’s a place where I like being, because of the warmth, the smell, the suggestion, as well, of another world, but I can’t touch anything. That is one of the few things forbidden in my grandparents’ home.’ In A Family Walk, Marcel Möring dives, while walking through the landscape of his childhood, into the past and searches for defining people and events. For the first time, he reveals his family history, which is largely characterized by forgetting, forgetting and carrying on.
