A novel in eight stories about bad decisions, misunderstandings and hope.

Literary fiction

Zuzana travels to the seaside to blot out a terrifying dream. Jitka is ashamed of her flabby belly and doesn’t want to be compared to anyone else. Hana finds her grandmother during a chance trip by car. Pavel has found peace working in the forest and doesn’t want to mess things up again. Iveta dresses the dead and conceals her snake tattoo. And Libor just takes photographs… They belong to one another, in a way they are all one family, and yet they are like ships that pass in the night. The short-story novel Waiting for the Trigger is a chronicle of this distance between them, spanning a period of seventy years. In a concentrated form, the book examines how seemingly unimportant decisions by one person can affect the lives of others and an innocuous incident can impinge on someone apparently unconnected with it.

Lidmila Kábrtová (1971) graduated in journalism from the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University in Prague, and later also in marketing communication from the Tomáš Baťa University in Zlín. She focused on journalism for several years before moving on to public relations, an area she has now worked in for more than twenty years. She is the author of a radio play for children, Šedivák (Grey), whose script won a prize in a Czech Radio competition. Her first book to be published was the experimental prose Koho vypijou lišky (Whom Foxes Drink Up, 2013). In 2018 she published the short-story collection Místa ve tmě (Places in the Dark), which was awarded the main prize by the Czech Literary Fund Foundation.