22 Novels set in Belgium

The Abyss is a 1968 novel by the Belgian-French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. Its narrative centers on the life and death of Zeno, a physician, philosopher, scientist and alchemist born in Bruges during the Renaissance era. The book was published in France in 1968 and was met with immediate popular interest as well as critical acclaim, obtaining the Prix Femina with unanimous votes the year of its publication. The English translation by Grace Frick has been published under the title The Abyss or alternatively Zeno of Bruges. Belgian filmmaker André Delvaux adapted it into a film in 1988.

Austerlitz is a 2001 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald's final novel. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

The Big Four is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by William Collins & Sons on 27 January 1927 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. It features Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, and Inspector Japp. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00.

Cloud Atlas is the third novel by British author David Mitchell. Published in 2004, the fantastical speculative fiction book consists of six interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to the island of Hawai'i in a distant post-apocalyptic future. The author has said that the book is about reincarnation and the universality of human nature, and the title references a changing landscape ('cloud') over manifestations of fixed human nature. The title was inspired by the piece of music of the same name by Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi.

Commander in Chief is a political thriller novel, written by Mark Greaney and released on December 1, 2015. In the book, President Jack Ryan and The Campus must stop Russian president Valeri Volodin from launching a covert violent offensive in an effort to bring back Russia as a superpower. Commander in Chief is Greaney’s third solo entry in the Jack Ryan series, which is part of the overall Tom Clancy universe. The book debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Day of the Jackal (1971) is a thriller novel by English author Frederick Forsyth about a professional assassin who is contracted by the OAS, a French dissident paramilitary organisation, to kill Charles de Gaulle, the President of France.

The Devil's Alternative is a novel by British writer Frederick Forsyth first published in 1979. It was his fourth full-length novel and marked a new direction in his work, setting the story in the near-future rather than in the recent past. The work evolved from an unfilmed screenplay entitled No Alternative.

A Dog of Flanders is an 1872 novel by English author Marie Louise de la Ramée published with her pseudonym "Ouida". It is about a Flemish boy named Nello and his dog, Patrasche, and is set in Antwerp.

The Dogs of War (1974) is a war novel by Frederick Forsyth featuring a small group of European mercenary soldiers hired by a British industrialist to depose the government of the fictional African country of Zangaro. The story details a geologist's mineral discovery, and the preparations for the attack: soldier recruitment, training, reconnaissance, and the logistics of the coup d'état. Like most of Forsyth's work, the novel is more about the protagonists' occupational tradecraft than their characters. The source of the title, The Dogs of War, is Act III, scene 1, line 270 of Julius Caesar (1599), by William Shakespeare: Cry, 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war.

Falling (1994) is a novel by the Flemish author Anne Provoost.

The Folding Star is a 1994 novel by Alan Hollinghurst.

The Fourth Protocol is a thriller novel by British writer Frederick Forsyth and published in August 1984.

High Time to Kill, published in 1999, is the fourth novel by Raymond Benson featuring Ian Fleming's secret agent, James Bond. This is the first James Bond novel copyrighted by Ian Fleming Publications. It was published in the United Kingdom by Hodder & Stoughton and in the United States by Putnam. The novel's working title was A Better Way to Die.

An Infamous Army is a novel by Georgette Heyer. In this novel Heyer combines her penchant for meticulously researched historical novels with her more popular period romances. So in addition to being a Regency romance, it is one of the most historically accurate and vividly narrated descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo. An Infamous Army completes the sequence begun with These Old Shades, and is also a sequel to Regency Buck.

Maigret at the Gai-Moulin is a detective novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon.

The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short is a 1947 novel by the Flemish writer Johan Daisne. It tells the story of a teacher at a girls' school who falls in love with one of his students; he moves from the town and changes profession in order to avoid her, and slowly begins to grow insane. The novel was published in English in 1965, translated by S. J. Sackett. It was adapted into a 1966 film with the same title directed by André Delvaux.

My Little War is the fourth novel by Louis Paul Boon, first published in 1947. A translation was produced by Paul Vincent in 2010.

The Negotiator is a crime novel by Frederick Forsyth first published in 1989. The story includes a number of threads that are slowly woven together. The central thread concerns a kidnapping that turns into a murder and the negotiator's attempts to solve the crime.

Jacqueline Harpman was a Belgian writer who wrote in French.

The Secret in the Old Lace is the fifty-ninth volume in the Nancy Drew mystery series. It was ghostwritten by Nancy Axelrad and first published in 1980 under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene under the Wanderer imprint of Simon and Schuster. It was later republished again in both Wanderer and Minstrel imprints, each time with a new cover. In 2005, Grosset & Dunlap reprinted it in the yellow hardback "glossy flashlight" format. The original edition cover art and six internal illustrations were by Ruth Sanderson. These illustrations were removed in the two subsequent printings.

Sharpe's Waterloo is a historical novel in the Richard Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell. Originally published in 1990 under the title Waterloo, it is the eleventh and final novel of the "original" Sharpe series, and the twentieth novel in chronological order.

The Sorrow of Belgium is a 1983 novel by the Belgian author Hugo Claus (1929–2008). The book, widely considered Claus's most important work and "the most important Dutch-language novel of the twentieth century", is a bildungsroman which explores themes around politics and growing up in Flanders around World War II. It has been described as "one of the great novels of postwar Europe".