Under its calm and cheerful surface, the Netherlands has produced some of the most searching fiction on the themes of wartime occupation, political barbarity and the hold on us of past evils. This tradition continues in three new novels, two of which reflect Europe's dreadful 20th century. The third confronts exile and persecution in modern Iran.

Tessa de Loo made her name in 1993 with a historical novel, "De Tweeling" (The Twins), which presented the war from the point of view of two sisters, one raised in Germany, the other in the Netherlands. Her latest book, "Een Bed in de Hemel" (A Bed in the Heavens), returns to the subject of the Holocaust. In the carefree 1960s, two Amsterdam students, Kata and Stefan, fall in love at first sight. But it turns out they may be brother and sister: in wartime, her mother had taken in (and taken up with) his father, a Jewish refugee and musician, while for self-protection conducting an affair with a Nazi. This somewhat forced moral structure is made up for by Ms de Loo's rich evocation of life in the Budapest ghetto and by her ability, in pared-down prose, to convey Kata's and Stefan's own confusions and anxieties.

Black comedy is the preferred approach of Arnon Grunberg, a literary star at only 29. His latest novel,"Fantoompijn" (Ghostpain), the story of a Jewish-Dutch writer living, like him, in New York, won him the AKO prize for fiction. The main activity of Mehlman, his anti-heroical literary self, is to think about writing and about leaving his wife. Success is ebbing, inspiration drying up; creditors and editors are closing in. He keeps one mistress, and starts an affair with another, one of his readers. In love as Mehlman is with muddle and failure, success eventually traps him in the form of an unexpected international bestseller, "The Polish-Jewish Kitchen in 69 Recipes: Cooking after Auschwitz". The book is taken as an essay in seriousness. He becomes a quotable public figure, a voice of reconciliation. But the mask is painful, the role impossible. He slides into madness.

"Fantoompijn" is Mr Grunberg's most complex and accomplished novel to date. It works in several registers at once. Mehlman uses his mother's concentration-camp number to gamble on, a despairing joke of a way to show that misfortune is always with us. In Mr Grunberg's disenchanted world people are commodities and identities are roles. The grimness is alleviated by absurdist humour, grotesque situations and snappy rejoinders reminiscent of Saul Bellow or, rather, Woody Allen. "There is no such thing as existential solitude, only the smell of it," sneers Mehlman at one point. As a quick take on isolation, this is not quite up to Mr Allen's famous exchange: "What are you doing Saturday night?" "Killing myself." "What are you doing Friday night?" But Mr Grunberg is without question a talent to watch.