Martin Vopěnka

The Fifth Dimension

Trans. Hana Sklenková
The Fifth Dimension The Fifth Dimension
Barbican Press, 2015, 288 pp
Language: English
Foreign rights:
Prague Literary Agency
http://www.praglit.de/
maria@sileny.de
Prose

A contemporary classic from the Czech Republic. To support his family, a man submits himself to a solo science experiment in the High Andes. A cosmic adventure story of big ideas and murder. Your business is dead. It seems like a deal: leave your family behind in Prague for a year, isolate yourself in a research station in the Andes, and come home with a fortune. With a treatise on black holes for company, Jakob settles in at altitude. The air is thin. Strangers pass by on dangerous pilgrimage while his young wife and kids take life in his mind. In mountain starkness, the big questions take shape: like what happens to love inside a black hole?

More information on the publisher’s website.

Praise

“Ably translated from the original Czech by Hana Sklenkova, The Fifth Dimension is a weighty and at times challenging read, its themes nothing less than life, death, the universe and love. It’s absorbing, haunting and intellectually engaging throughout, with a gut-punch denouement.”

James Lovegrove, The Financial Times

“[Vopěnka’s] depiction of Jakub’s increasingly tendentious relationship with reality manages to be both mundane and terrifying, and absurd without being farcical. (…) It is a testament to Vopěnka’s sympathetic writing, however, that when reality does reassert itself, it is bittersweet and haunting.”

Christopher Hyland, The Times Literary Supplement

“Never less than throroughly compelling […] This alliance between dry style and colourful subject creates a glorious uncertainty which propels the reader through a narrative”

Dan Hartland, Vector (The British Science Fiction Association)

About the translator

Hana Sklenková, the University of Plymouth BA in English and Creative Writing and MA in Creative Writing graduate (2007; 2009) was born in 1977 in Žamberk and has been writing in English since 2003. She was awarded first prize in The New Writer Prose and Poetry Prizes 2010 for her novella, Cape of Good Hope.

Information about the original Czech edition

Pátý rozměr

Other selected published translations (1)

Piąty wymiar Polish

Barbican Press, 2015, 288 pp
Language: English
Foreign rights:
Prague Literary Agency
http://www.praglit.de/
maria@sileny.de