Here the female narrator, a twenty-year-old editor who works on a fictive woman’s weekly, candidly assesses her own love affairs. The story provides the author with space for an ironic polemic on the archetypal character so essential to so-called ‘writing for women’ – the ‘ideal man’.

In fact this is a slightly grotesque story of two women: the narrator Laura and her widowed mother, the interpreter and translator Jana. Both women are forever seeking ‘the one’. Jana was once heavily involved with a Czech guy, and ever since she has hated typical Czech men from the bottom of her heart, and keeps looking for the foreigner of her dreams. Laura eventually falls in love with 40-year Oliver. At the centre of the plot is the fact that Oliver is the very man who was once Laura´s mother’s great love, in other words that prototype of all Czech men …