Innocence

While Manuel Horst, a young war photographer, is kidnapped by jihadists in Syria, his father, a well-known forensic psychiatrist, who suffers from cancer, dies during a mountain hike in the Pyrenees. Manuel is released, meets the Syrian refugee Nada in Beirut, and takes her with him to Belgium. In the house inherited from his father, they raise their child and try to build a new life. But not all traumas have been processed. Is Nada's story complete? And what was his father, with whom Manuel broke off contact years ago, doing in the Pyrenees in the last week before his death? And why did his father travel to the Middle East himself shortly before, in a surreal quest for Manuel? Did Manuel's kidnapping leave as few wounds as he tells himself? When catastrophe threatens, Manuel starts digging into his father's past, in search of the man he has hated for years. Or perhaps in search of himself?

Innocence is a bloodcurdling novel, close to current events, but built around age-old questions about guilt, innocence, truth and civilisation. 'That I am a broken man, but that it is good to be a broken man, that I am ready to start all over again.'