533 days in the life of a great European writer. Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to the island of Menorca, ‘the island of the wind’, and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over with native plants and fauna, that the 533 days of writing take place. The product is not a diary, nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates, but ‘a book of days’ to retain ‘something of the flow of thoughts, and of what one reads and sees’ with concerns about his cactus garden and suffering hibiscus, his love for Menorca, his thoughts on the world and on the place we humans have in the universe.