Published on the occasion of the 2007 Dutch National Book Week
Written as Dutch Book Week special in 2007, De brug evokes the atmosphere of a city which straddles two continents, connected by a bridge. These are stories about the old Turkey and the new, based on encounters on the bridge that links the European and Asian sections of Istanbul.

First published in 2005
How can we ever tell this to our great-grandchildren, the story of those final months of 2004? What will we remember about it? The knifed body lying on Linnaeusstraat? The skeletons that came out of the closet afterwards? The perpetually moving lips of politicians and intellectuals? The silence in the city? The tone, the new tone that was suddenly in vogue? How can one begin to tell?

First published in 2004
Following a tangle of routes that led him to London, Volgograd and Madrid, past the bunkers of Berlin, the perfumed closets of Helena Ceausescu in Bucharest and the toy automobiles in an abandoned day-care center in Chernobyl, Geert Mak traveled in the footsteps of the 20th century.

First published in 1999
What is it that connects us with all those who lived in the century that has passed? Isn’t it – even more than their major and minor acts of heroism - their humanity, and sometimes their blindness? With this family history, Geert Mak has written a biography of the twentieth-century Netherlands.

First published in October 1996
Hoe God verdween uit Jorwerd is the biography of a village during the “silent revolution”, between 1945 and 1995. It is the story of farmers and big money, of the little shopkeepers and the advancing city, of the church steeple that collapsed and the newcomers who no longer bother to say “hello”. The story of beautiful Gais Meinsma, of the greengrocer and his homesickness, and of Peer, who breathed his last amid the curly kale.

First published in January 1995
The tiny secret of a mediaeval shoe found in the dark-blue mud at the bottom of an Amsterdam canal, the women’s revolt at the Begijnhof, the diary of a terrified priest during the famine of 1575, the tragedy of the maidservant Elsje Christiaens and the famous painter Rembrandt van Rijn, the apocalypse of Mayor Coenraad van Beuningen, the Great Freeze of 1763 and the forgotten courage of Wallie and Gijs van Hall.