["“[Hertmans’s] most recent pastiche of fiction, memoir and Sebaldian evidence gathering [is] inspired by the discovery that his former home in Ghent once housed a notorious Nazi collaborator . . . [The Ascent] deftly blends reporting and speculation as he reimagines the lives these rooms once sheltered, laying out the terrible consequences of an ambitious man’s blinkered devotion to the bureaucracy of the Reich.” —The New York Times Book Review

“When Bel­gian author Ste­fan Hert­mans decid­ed to rent a damp old house on the banks of the sludgy Lieveke canal in a run­down neigh­bor­hood of Ghent, he wasn’t think­ing about its pre­vi­ous inhab­i­tants. . . . But many years after he left the three-sto­ry house . . . he learned that, dur­ing World War II, it was occu­pied by Willem Ver­hulst, an SS intel­li­gence offi­cer. . . . Strad­dling the line between non­fic­tion and fic­tion. . . . [Hertmans] presents a grip­ping tale of the house on Dro­gen­hof Street, which con­tains both his own mem­o­ries and the secrets of the SS offi­cer and his family. . . . Using the house as a frame­work, the author pro­vides a vis­cer­al sense of life in the occu­pied city dur­ing the war. . . . Beau­ti­ful­ly trans­lat­ed by David McK­ay. . . . Hertmans’s par­al­lel sto­ries of Verhulst’s treach­ery and his own path to uncov­er­ing the secrets hid­den in the Dro­gen­hof house make for a com­pelling read. . . . the read­er can hard­ly wait to find out what he discovers.” —Jewish Book Council

“A fascinating project of autofiction. . . . Hertmans had already sold his former home in Ghent when he read a memoir by a former occupant that shocked him: before he’d lived there, an SS officer had called the place home. Hertmans uses this jarring revelation . . . to explore the home’s long history and reconsider the meaning of sanctuary.” —CrimeReads