ABOUT THE BOOK

The worst blizzard the East Netherlands has seen in many years has left Nathan Hollander and his niece, Nina, snowbound in the deserted house of their late Uncle Herman. Waiting for the storm to subside, they piece together the story of their forefathers, a family of itinerant clockmakers who came from Eastern Europe to the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and fled to America in 1939.

In this funny, quirky, epic novel, Marcel Möring weaves a gloriously inventive and very human story about man's constant drive towards progression and expansion, his coming and going, from the Old World to the New - and his desire, despite everything, for home and homeland.

Marcel Möring was born in 1957 in Enschede, Holland. Publication of his first novel, Mendel, was an instant success, winning Holland's Geertjan Lubberhuizen Prize for Best Debut. His second novel, The Great Longing was the Dutch Bestseller of 1992, and received the country's most prestigious prize, the AKO. It was translated into many languages, and was published in English by Flamingo. In Babylon is Möring's third novel. He lives in Rotterdam.