A novel for today’s world. Full of action, struggle – as well as the knowledge that it’s not going to get any better.

Literary fiction

Once again, the time-place backdrop of Bellová’s prose is vague and uncertain. It could be today, it could be the 1960s, or the 1930s; it could be somewhere in Turkey, Greece, perhaps in Spain – or a different time and place entirely. This uncertainty resonates perfectly with that of the narrator – the main character who one day frees herself from an unhappy marriage and sets out “on the road”. She returns to where it all began – her home village – and attempts to find out who she really is and what went wrong with her parents’ and grandparents’ generations. How her father, the titular “invisible man”, died tragically, and why her mother fell into total silence for thirty years. She compares then and now, confronting the past with the present. All of this within the dramatic, heightened atmosphere of an unnamed war. Despite all of the uncertainty and vagueness, in the end it is clear what the author stands for: for the feminine cause, for feelings, home, offspring, against recurrent human stupidity and ignorance, against the envy and hatred which suffocate a person and their soul.

Bianca Bellová (1970), who lives in Prague, is a writer, translator and interpreter. She achieved her international breakthrough with the book novel Jezero (The Lake, 2016) which won the 2017 Magnesia Litera Award in the Book of the Year category, the 2017 European Union Prize for Literature, and the 2023 EBRD Literature Prize; publication rights for it have been sold to twenty-four countries. 2019 saw the publication of her novel Mona, which won the Czech Book Prize. Her latest work is the novel Neviditelný muž (The Invisible Man, 2024), whose English edition is forthcoming from Parthian Books in 2026.