Clever, precocious Ellen is the only one of the four closely knit Van Bemmel children who dreads the coming of a new baby. Imagine that the curse she cast on her unborn sister should come true. And she told her parents to call the baby Ida, the ugliest name she could think of. When, on the morning of Ellen's twelfth birthday, her three-year-old brother has a shocking accident, it seems a premonition of the horror that will infiltrate their happy if eccentric household, an unspeakable disaster which even Ellen, dubbed by her father "the cement of the family", is powerless to prevent.
Twenty-five years later a pregnant Ellen returns to the family home. Camping out in the bare rooms, while confined to bed by a threatened miscarriage, she is haunted by the increasingly demanding voices of her dead family. Finally, leafing through an old photograph album, she finds the courage to seek an answer to the questions she knows her own child will later ask: "Mummy, don't I have a granny? No grandad? No uncles or aunts? Why not?"
'A Heart Of Stone', warmed by a passionate affection for all its characters, full of laughter and love in spite of the tragedy at its centre, is a page-turner driven by a skin-prickling atmosphere of unavoidable disaster. This elegant, memorable novel serves as a fitting introduction of this highly praised novelist from the Netherlands to an English-speaking audience.
