Love, adventure, exoticism, enterprise – traditional ingredients that can still be worked with to create a playful yet sophisticated story.

Literary fiction  |  English sample translation available

The Island is a compact novel that focuses on an isolated island through which trade routes between Europe and Asia ran sometime in the late 17th century. Rather than being a utopia, the novel is a dystopia – the good times are long gone and now everything is just surviving, nostalgically looking back to the past and unable to stop decay and extinction. This atmosphere evokes Bianca Bellová’s previous novels – The Lake and Mona. However, the melancholy of the island is balanced by the places where it is possible to make a name for oneself and where the predatory entrepreneurial spirit that prevails on the journey from Venice to Persia is already manifesting itself. One passes imperceptibly into the other: the novel shows how thin the line is between cleverness and calculation, courage and recklessness, civilization and barbarism, but also between love and self-love. The Island has all the ingredients of a story that can’t be put down until we know how it turns out.

Bianca Bellová (1970) was born in Prague, where she lives halfway between the Balkan and British parts of her family. She is a writer, translator and interpreter. She has published several books of fiction, most notably the novel Jezero (The Lake, 2016) which has won a number of literary awards, including the 2017 EU Prize for Literature and the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize, and its publication rights have been sold to twenty-five countries. Her latest books are Ostrov (The Island, 2022) and Transfer (2023).