The Hartland Trilogy 1: Butterfly on the Storm

Thriller | 464 p.

The Hartland Trilogy 1: Butterfly on the Storm

Walter Lucius &


The first instalment in the bestselling original Dutch thriller.

Haunted by a past you can never escape...

A young boy is found in woods outside Amsterdam. Broken and bloody, he appears to be the victim of a brutal hit-and-run. When the police at the hospital ask what happened, the one word the boy repeats they don't understand.

But journalist Farah Hafez does. She left Afghanistan as a child and she recognises her native tongue. As the boy is taken into surgery she finds herself visiting the scene of the crime, seeking to discover how a little Afghan boy came to be so far from home.

Instead, she comes across a burnt-out car with two charred bodies inside - a sinister clue to something much darker than a simple road accident.

It is just the start of a journey that will lead her from one twist to another in an intricate web of crime and corruption that stretches from Amsterdam all the way to Moscow, Kabul and Johannesburg and deep into a past that Farah had sought to leave behind - a past that nearly killed her.


Good to Know

    • Full Dutch, French, English and German translation available
    • An international hit and a bestseller in France and the Netherlands
    • Nominated for ‘Prix du meilleur Polar Européen’
    • Winner of the Shadow Prize for best thriller debut

Rights sold to

    • Penguin (Michael Joseph) / UK
    • Lattès / France
    • Suhrkamp / Germany
    • Marsilio /  Italy
    • People’s Press / Denmark
    • Salamandra / Spain
    • Campana / Catalan
    • Vysehrad / Czech Republic
    • Amber / Poland

Want to know more?

For all your enquiries about Walter Lucius please contact: Marianne Schönbach.