Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

Bob Van Laerhoven published more than 30 novels in Holland and Belgium. He explored trouble-spots across the globe from 1990 to 2003: Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Myanmar, Mozambique, Lebanon, Burundi, Kosovo… During the Bosnian war, in 1995, he sneaked into the besieged town of Tuzla when the refugees arrived from the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica. This resulted in the book Sebrenica.Testimony to a Mass Murder .

De wraak van Baudelaire won him the Hercule Poirot Prize for best suspense novel of the year in Flanders in 2007. The French translation La Vengeance de Baudelaire was published in 2013, followed by Baudelaire’s Revenge in the US, and Месть Бодлера in Russia. Baudelaire’s Revenge won the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category “mystery/suspense.” Laerhoven’s short story collection Dangerous Obsessions (2015) was “best short story collection of the year” in The San Diego Book Review and is translated in Italian, Brazilian, Spanish, and Swedish. Heart Fever , his second collection, came out in the US in January 2018. He contributed to Brussels Noir in Akashic’s famous Noir-series. Brussels Noir was translated in French and in Polish.

Crime Wave Pressis a Hong Kong based fiction imprint that endeavors to publish the best new crime novels from around the globe.

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Van Laerhoven’s Return to Hiroshimamight well be the most complex Flemish crime novel ever written.

A complex and grisly literary crime story which among other things refers to the effects of the nuclear attack on Japan.

Van Laerhoven skilfully creates the right atmosphere for this drama. As a consequence the whole book is shrouded in a haze of doom. Is this due to Hiroshima itself, a place burdened with a terrible past? Or is the air of desperation typical for our modern society?

Van Laerhoven won the Hercule Poirot Prize with Baudelaire’s Revenge. You’ll understand why after reading Return to Hiroshima.

Originally published in 2010 in Belgium as Terug naar Hiroshima

© Bob van Laerhoven / Houtekiet / Linkeroever Uitgevers nv

This edition published in 2018 by

Crime Wave Press

Flat D, 11th Fl. Liberty Mansion

26E Jordan Road

Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong

www.crimewavepress.com

English Translation Copyright © 2017 by Brian Doyle

The translation of this book is funded by Flanders Literature.

Protected by copyright under the terms of the International Copyright Union: All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

e-book ISBN: 978-988-14938-7-3

This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and other elements of the story are either the product of the author’s imagination or else are used only fictitiously.

Any resemblance to real characters, alive or dead, or to real incidents is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Hans Kemp

Author photograph © Studio Schrever