Literary fiction

Journalist Pavel Klimeš is entering middle age. He is recently divorced, has lost his parents and is attempting to find new purpose in his life. In an atmosphere of oppressive retrospection, he falls back on memories of childhood friends with whom he spent every summer in a chalet in the Giant Mountains in North Bohemia. These holidays were also joined by his father’s colleague Milan Knot, who in the 1970s signed up as a collaborator with the State Security police. After the Velvet Revolution, Pavel gets hold of Knot’s file and denounces his erstwhile family friend in a newspaper. But twenty-five years later, doubts and discrepancies have appeared in the case.

More than just another reflection on the period of Normalization in the 1970s, Přibáň’s novel captures the gradual maturing of those involved in the Velvet Revolution in November 1989.