Midnight Blue

Holland in the second half of the 17th century. After the death of her much older husband, the artistically gifted Catrijn leaves her home village near Alkmaar to live in the city as she has always wanted. She gets a job as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in Amsterdam, where Rembrandt van Rijn lives and works at the time. Catrijn is happy here, but soon she is forced to leave the good place and go to distant Delft because of a shadow from her past. She accepts an offer to work as a painter in a ceramic workshop and participates in the birth of the famous Dutch faience. Here he finds close friends, including Jan Vermeer, and the love of his life. But hard times are coming. In Delft, there is a huge explosion of an ammunition depot that destroyed a large part of the city in 1654. And then the plague, which struck most of the country in the same year and which would change Catrijn's life forever, enters the story. Simone van der Vlugt guides her heroine through a fascinating period of Dutch history, the golden age of the 17th and early 18th centuries, which saw an unprecedented boom in trade, science and art. He has her travel across Holland, experiencing real historical events and meeting real characters, and through her humanly powerful story he paints a vivid picture of a time long gone.