J. H. F. Gronloh was a successful Dutch businessman, executive of the Holl&-Bombay Trading Company & father of four, with a secret life: under the pseudonym Nescio (Latin for ”I don`t know”), he wrote a series of short stories that went unrecognized at the time but that are now widely considered the best prose ever written in Dutch. Nescio`s stories look back on the enthusiasms of youth with an achingly beautiful melancholy comparable to the work of Alain-Fournier & F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes of young dreams from the perspective of adult resignation, but reinhabits youthful ambition & adventure so fully that the later perspective is the one thrown into doubt-and with language as fresh as when it was written a century ago. His last long story, written & set during World War II, is a remarkable evocation of the Netherlands in wartime & a hymn to our capacity to take refuge in memory & imagination. This is great literature-capturing the Dutch landscape & scenes of Amsterdam with a remarkable poetry, & expressing the spirit of the country of businessmen & van Gogh, merchants & visionaries.