Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch, 83, died of cancer at home in The Netherlands on Saturday. He authored more than 30 works, including the internationally acclaimed novels The Assault (1982) and The Discovery of Heaven (1992). According to The New York Times:

His most ambitious novel, The Discovery of Heaven, also widely translated, was hailed as his masterpiece. A melodrama more than 700 pages long, framed by debates between angels in heaven, tells a tale of an intense intellectual friendship spiced with a love triangle. But it also offers a sweeping discourse on history and art, science and religion, man and God, good and evil. … Despite, or because of, the novel’s many layers of intellectual inquiry, it became a best seller and was voted the best Dutch-language book ever by Dutch readers in a 2007 newspaper poll.