The Occupied Garden is the powerful true story of a market gardener and his fiercely devout wife who were living a simple life in Holland when the Nazis invaded in 1940. During the subsequent occupation, Gerrit and Cor den Hartog struggled to keep their young family from starving and from being broken up in an era of intimidation, disappearances, and bombings -- until one devastating day when they found they were unable to protect their children from the war. 
It wasn’t until long after Gerrit and Cor’s deaths that their granddaughters began to piece their story together; combing through Dutch archives, family lore, and a neighbor’s wartime diary, den Hartog and Kasaboski have lovingly and seamlessly recreated their grandparents’ wartime years. The result is an extraordinary tale of strife and hardship that contains moments of breathtaking courage -- a young mother’s bicycle journey of two hundred miles to find food for her children, a brother and sister’s desperate escape into unoccupied France, a pastor forced into hiding for encouraging acts of resistance -- with a cast of characters that includes the exiled Dutch royal family, Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. But it is Gerrit and Cor who take center stage in what is ultimately a deeply moving love story of a man and woman who drew strength from each other throughout those difficult years. 
Poignant and unforgettable, The Occupied Garden is a testament to the resiliency of ordinary people living in an extraordinary time, written by two sisters determined to keep their family history alive.

The Occupied Garden: A Family Memoir of War-Torn Holland

Biographies & Memoirs

Kasaboski, Tracy

Den Hartog, Kristen

Historical

Thomas Dunne Books

Physical description; 226 pages. Notes; SIGNED and inscribed by the author. NOT price-clipped. First edition and first pringint. Subjects; Parent and adult child -- Fiction. Mothers and daughters -- Fiction. Remarriage -- Fiction. Genres; Domestic fiction. Bildungsromans. Fiction.

Water Wings

Literature & Fiction

Knopf Canada

World Literature

Vintage Canada

The Perpetual Ending

Physical description; 276 p. ; 23 cm. Notes; SIGNED and inscribed by the author. NOT price-clipped. First edition and first printing. Subjects; Kristen den Hartog (1965-). 20th-century fiction. Genre; Fiction.

PERPETUAL ENDING, The

Alfred.A. Knopf

Origin of Haloes

When sixteen-year-old gymnast Kay Clancy finds herself pregnant by the handsome Coach Halliwell, she tells a lie that has dire consequences. Despite her transgressions, she manages to marry the young Joe LeBlanc, and embarks on a happy life with him until suddenly, late in Kay’s third pregnancy, he vanishes, along with his treasured canoe. Joe is nowhere to be found, but his paddle surfaces near a dock in front of the Halliwell home, where the coach lives with his manic but fragile wife, Marie, and their son, Eddie. Years on, Margar, the mischievous daughter Joe never knew, is determined to find her father. Time and again she is drawn to that house by the river. What Margar discovers there will change forever the way she views her family.From the acclaimed author of Water Wings and The Perpetual Ending, Origin of Haloes is a novel of lives large and small, interweaving captivating vignettes from Olympic history and Greek mythology with small-town Ontario to tell a story of love, betrayal, and loss.From the Hardcover edition.

Literary

Emblem Editions

A moving, revealing memoir about a man and his young family during the Nazi occupation of Holland, as told by his granddaughters, one a beloved novelist. At once a memoir and a social history of a time, The Occupied Garden is the story of a good but poor man, a market gardener, and his fiercely devout wife, raising their young family in Holland during the Nazi occupation. Pieced together by the couple’s granddaughters, who combed through historical research, family lore, and insights from a neighbour’s wartime diary, the story chronicles how the couple struggled to keep their children from starving, but could not keep them from harm, and reveals the strife and hardship endured not just by them, but by a nation. These experiences, kept from subsequent generations of the family, were almost lost until, long after their deaths, the path of the couple through the war and on to Canada was uncovered. A personal and intimate account within the larger context of a terrorized nation, this is also a story of the bonds and strains among family, told with the haunting, evocative prose for which Kristen den Hartog is known. From the Hardcover edition.

“Something good can come from even the most terrifying things. For eve y thing that is taken away, something else is given.” Ruth Brennan is a giant, “a rare, organic blunder pressed into a dollhouse world,” as she calls herself. Growing up in a small town, where even an ordinary person can’t simply fade into the background, there is no hiding the fact that Ruth is different: she can see it in the eyes of everyone around her, even her own parents. James and Elspeth Brennan are emotionally at sea, struggling with the devastation wrought on their lives by World War Ii and with their unspoken terror that the daughter they love may, like so much else, one day be taken away from them. But fate works in strange ways, and Ruth finds that for all the things that go unsaid around her, she is nonetheless able to see deeply into the secret hearts of others—their past traumas, their present fears, and the people they might become, if only they have courage enough.

The Girl Giant: A Novel

Simon&Schuster

Stretching across two decades and unfolding in Olympic-year intervals, Origin of Haloes tells the story of two families – the LeBlancs and the Halliwells – connected by an illicit affair and a lie that has dire consequences. A tale of love, betrayal, and lingering ghosts, Origin of Haloes explores the shattering ways a family can break apart even as it stays together.

Genre Fiction

Lawson Library

Finding herself pregnant at the age of sixteen, sixteen-year-old aspiring gymnast Kay Clancy marries her high-school sweetheart, Joe LeBlanc, although he is not the father of her child, an action that has profound repercussions years later when Joe mysteriously vanishes and Kay fears that he has discovered the shameful truth.

Hartog, Kristen Den

Macadam Cage Pub

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Den Hartog, Kristen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Den Hartog, Kristen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Den Hartog, Kristen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Occupied Garden: A Family Memoir of War-Torn Holland

Water Wings

Water Wings

The Perpetual Ending

PERPETUAL ENDING, The

Origin of Haloes

The Occupied Garden: A Family Memoir of War-Torn Holland

The Girl Giant: A Novel

Origin of Haloes

Origin of Haloes