Based on real events, this bestselling novel has the pace and drama of a gripping film.

Literary fiction  |  English sample translation available

This novel contains two storylines that take place on two different spatial-temporal planes. In a small Czech village, nine-year-old Mira’s family succumbs to an outbreak of typhus in the 1950s. She ends up in the hands of her strange aunt Hana, with whom Mira spends the whole of her childhood and adolescence. Later on, she discovers hidden facts about Hana’s past and the tragic story of Mira’s own family, which is revealed to be Jewish. The second storyline of the novel is from World War II and shares Hana’s story. It takes place in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, and explores the guilt motif that Hana felt over the death of her parents. A page-turner, Hana is narrated in a traditional manner, with skilled realism, a flair for dramatic rhythm and composition, and with a deep knowledge about the time and circumstances of the story. As the novel comes to an end, there is a spark of hope, tinged by the belief that you cannot rid yourself of your family’s past and, indeed, of your fate.

Alena Mornštajnová (1963) is a Czech writer and translator. She graduated in English and Czech from Ostrava University’s Faculty of Arts. She lives in Valašské Meziříčí. Her debut novel Slepá mapa (Blind Map) was published in 2013 and was nominated for the 2014 Czech Book Prize. Her second novel, Hotýlek (The Little Hotel), was published in 2015. 2017 saw the publication of her third novel, Hana, which has been her most successful novel to date and has been translated into several languages. Her first book for children, Strašidýlko stráša (Stráša the Little Ghost), with illustrations by Galina Miklínová, was also very popular with readers. Her novel, Tiché roky (Years of Silence, 2019), has confirmed her position as a bestselling author, a novelist with perhaps the broadest readership base in the Czech Republic, whose breakthrough into the world of established Czech writers came relatively late, when she was already middle-aged, but was all the more decisive for it.