The Song and the Truth

Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies and Nazi-occupied Holland, this luminous novel delivers epic themes filtered through the rich imagination of a young girl. Living with her parents on the island of Java in the late 1930s, five-year-old Lulu moves in a magical world of daydreams and island myths. But when one day Lulu innocently describes a scene she stumbled across late one night, the repercussions are felt for many years and across two continents. Called from the sumptuous tropics back to The Hague, with stops in Marseilles, Paris, and London along the way, Lulu's family is soon forced into hiding as the war approaches.

A moving account of a childhood overwhelmed by history, The Song and the Truth is a profound meditation on how the paradox of memory–at once intransigent and elusive–shapes our lives.

Helga Ruebsamen was born in 1934 in Jakarta, Indonesia, and spent her early childhood on Java. In 1939 her family traveled to Europe, and they stayed in Holland throughout the war. She worked as a journalist forHet Vaderland, a newspaper in The Hague, before becoming a freelance writer. She is the author of five collections of short stories and two previous novels.The Song and the Truth is her first work to be published in English.