The convert
(Book)

Originally published in the Netherlands as De bekeerlinge by De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, in 2016. Copyright © 2016 by Stefan Hertmans. This translation originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2019.

"The Middle Ages have just begun when Vigdis Adelaïs, a young woman from a prosperous French family, falls in love with David Todros, a student at the city's yeshiva, and the son of a rabbi. To be together, they must flee their city, Vigdis renouncing a life of privilege and comfort. Pursued by her father's knights and in constant danger of betrayal, the lovers embark on a dangerous journey to the south of France, only to find their brief happiness destroyed by the vicious wave of anti-Semitism that sweeps Europe with the onset of the First Crusade. Stefan Hertmans meticulously retraces Vigdis's epic journey, first across France and then beyond, to Palermo and the Middle East. Blending fact and fiction, and with immense imagination and stylistic ingenuity, he painstakingly imagines her terrible trials, bringing the Middle Ages to life, and illuminating a chaotic world of passion, hate, love, and death"--

Translated from the Dutch.