A novel about a woman who, trapped by faith, debt and maternal devotion, loses control over her own body and life and painfully searches for the way back to herself.

Literary fiction

In the novel Beliefs, Anna Beata Háblová follows the fate of a woman whose life is gradually falling apart under the pressure of her economic situation and the conflict between personal failures and internally adopted dogmas. Without moralizing, the novel offers a sensitive, socially critical view of sex work, while capturing the inner struggle of a woman who wants to escape a violent environment but runs up against manipulation, obedience and her own inability to resist. Intimate scenes are replaced by the unconventional motif of cooking—recipes become both an escape strategy and an image of inner tension. A surprising political dimension also enters the personal story, along with the motif of faith in transformation, which may be either salvation or illusion.

Anna Beata Háblová (1983) is a writer, poet, slam poet, as well as an architect and visual artist. She produces paintings which connect architecture, poetry and street art. She has published four poetry collections. In 2017, she released the popular nonfiction book Cities of Walls, focusing on the history and interpretation of shopping centres in relation to the city. This was followed by Non-Places of Cities (2019), a work on the intersection between scholarly study and fiction, exploring overlooked, transient and bypassed urban spaces. In recent years, she has contributed essays on architecture to Czech Radio, where she also hosted the philosophy podcast A Complex Age. In 2022, she published her first novel The Shift, which is being translated into six languages.