About this item

An engrossing, epic saga of one family's experiences on both sides of WWII, All Ships Follow Me questions our common narrative of the conflict and our stark notions of victim and perpetrator, while tracing the lasting effects of war through several generations.In March 1942, Mieke Eerkens' father was a ten-year-old boy living in the Dutch East Indies. When the Japanese invaded the island he, his family, and one hundred thousand other Dutch civilians were interned in a concentration camp and forced into hard labor for three years. After the Japanese surrendered, Mieke's father and his family were set free in a country that plunged immediately into civil war. Across the globe in the Netherlands, police carried a crying five-year-old girl out of her home at war's end, abandoned and ostracized as a daughter of Nazi sympathizers.



About the Author

Mieke Eerkens

Mieke Eerkens teaches creative writing online for UCLA Extension's Writers' Program and is a visiting instructor for the Iowa Summer Writing Program. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Creative Nonfiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica, among others, as well as the anthologies Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts; The Book of Uncommon Prayer; Best Travel Writing 2011; and Water's Edge: Open to Interpretation. She earned a B.A. from San Francisco State University where she was the editor-in-chief of the lit journal, Transfer, an M.A. in English from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She divides her time between Amsterdam and California.



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