A disturbing story of abuse and hope styled as an audio recorded confession with the pace of a flight.

Literary fiction

After having won over critics and the public alike in 2020 with her second novel The Ballerinas, Miřenka Čechová has produced another novel with a serious and compelling theme: what impact does child abuse have on a person’s future? When Laura was fourteen, her mother jumped from a window. Although she survived, Laura, who had no-one else to look after her while her mother remained confined to her bed, ended up in a children’s home. She was looked after by the ‘aunts’, while her new siblings were mainly disabled and Romany children. Someone else came to the home, however—a thirty-year- old male primary school teacher, who taught at the children’s home in his spare time, but who was also scheming to seduce the underage Laura. What might initially appear as an innocent children’s romance transforms into a horrific study of manipulation and abuse. Laura narrates all of this with the detachment of a prostitute from a luxurious boudoir, and tells her story—full of revelations, accusations and sharp analyses of social hypocrisy—as an audio recording of her own voice, intended to be heard by the one who caused it all.

The work of Miřenka Čechová (1982) lies at the intersection of experimental theatre and literature. Her theatre projects include plays based on the authentic stories of unseen women and often engage with pressing social issues. She is the author of the autobiographical styled prose work The Ballerinas (Paseka, 2020), which was nominated for the European Union Prize for Literature, as well as the fictional documentary Miss AmeriKa (2018). She has adapted both these works for the stage, earning two Thalia Award nominations for the theatrical productions.