Can a woman wake up one day and say #MeToo twenty years later?

Literary fiction

Entering her fifties, Sylvie Novak looks back on her successful career as a partisan writer and reflects on her complicated personal life. She revisits memories of an initiatory relationship with an older writer, reevaluating what happened long ago. And then there is the present: touring with her new book of feminist essays, dealing with the signs of ageing, and fighting the Invisible Woman Syndrome, all of which Sylvie does in her own way. But on top of everything, Sylvie’s daughter Judita, has no scruples about standing up to her mother, and eventually plays the ultimate card against her.

Against a backdrop of stereotypes, generational clashes, and various forms of social activism, the reader becomes a spectator of a struggle.

Petra Hůlová (1979) is a fiction writer and the recipient of several literary awards, including Czechia’s highest literary recognitions – the Magnesia Litera Award, the Josef Škvorecký Award and the Jiří Orten Award. She studied languages, culture, and anthropology at universities in Prague, Ulan Bator and New York, and was a Fulbright scholar in the USA. Her first novel, Paměť mojí babičce (All This Belongs to Me, 2002), won the Magnesia Litera Award for Discovery of the Year. The English translation by Alex Zucker won the ALTA National Translation Award. Her fourth novel, Umělohmotný třípokoj (2006), won the Jiří Orten Prize for the best work of prose or poetry by an author under thirty; Alex Zucker’s English Translation won the PEN Translates Award. In total, her novels and two plays of hers have been translated into more than ten languages. Nejvyšší karta (Trump Card, 2023), an extraordinary novel about culture wars in our everyday life, is her latest novel. She lives in Prague.