Little Caesar

From internationally best-selling author Tommy Wieringa comes a rich and engrossing novel about a man on an odyssey in search of answers about his dysfunctional artistic family and the legacy they left behind.

When Ludwig Unger returned to his hometown after a decade, he arrived with a plastic bag filled with his mother’s ashes and little else. He was there to make amends with his lonely past, to say good-bye to the familial ghosts that still haunted him. Raised in a cliff-top cottage on the east coast of England, Ludwig’s mother did her best to create a normal life for her son after her mega­lomaniac husband left them to pursue his art. A mama’s boy, Ludwig grew up in her shadow, developing an obsession with her and her sensual allure. But when he discovered the secret of her past as the world-famous porn star “Eve LaSage” and her plans to stage a comeback, Ludwig’s world spun out of con­trol. He soon found himself homeless, shouldering the shame of his mother’s career, and embarking on a journey that took him around the world from Los Angeles to Prague to El Real.

Little Caesar is a story of beauty and decay, of filial loyalty and parental betrayal, and of the importance, in the end, of self-sacrifice.

“A major novel filled with sharp psychological insights and fine writing . . . Wieringa shifts effortlessly between myth and reality, and lines up one felicitous idea after another. Tommy Wieringa is, mark my words, the greatest living novelist of Dutch letters.” —Vrij Nederland

“A masterpiece.” —Boekenweek

“Dazzling . . . The pleasure in storytelling leaps from the pages. A fascinat­ing novel.” —Trouw