In her latest novel, one of the most successful young Czech authors asks how can we know what is best for others when we ourselves do not know how to be happy?

Ten-year-old Viktor is a spoiled troublemaker who lives with his mother, thirty-year-old theatre actress Hana. One day, Hana receives an offer to act in a TV series filmed on the other side of the country. She sees this as an opportunity to send her son to stay with her mother, who lives in the countryside and has her own strict ideas about how to educate the boy. For each of the characters, Viktor’s move is intended to ‘solve’ the root of their current troubles: what can you do with the remainder of your life when you are ten, thirty or sixty? WHAT really is best for everybody? In telling the story, the three characters alternate as first-person narrators, gradually introducing the reader to each of their perspectives, opinions, personalities and relationships. Who is really trying to help and who has betrayed the others? Petra Soukupová is a master of portraying family relationships and the loneliness inside of them. She has an exceptional understanding of, both, child characters, as well as those who are nearing the end of their lives.

Best for Everybody shares certain plot points with Soukupová’s latest book for children, Kdo zabil Snížka (Who Killed Snowy?). The two books complement each other, creating a unique reading experience for parents and children.

This extremely readable international drama recounts true historical events without resorting to the usual clichés of comics biographies, and offers an exciting story with masterful narration and unusual drawings.

The story of Nicholas Winton, who saved 669 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, is well known – at least in its outlines – and is usually presented in terms of his heroism and admiration at what he achieved. Tereza Verecká’s story in no way seeks to undermine Winton’s heroism, but she presents it without pathos, and most importantly, she shines light on the diverse background of those who helped him and who normally remain in the shadow of “the legend of Winton the rescuer”. Based on his memoirs, his story is then compared with the perspective of Doreen Warriner, which reveals that behind every great man is a woman (though not nearly as famous despite being hugely influential). The reader will probably need some time to get used to Podprocký’s drawing style in relation to the theme of the comic book, but it is well worth it as it is sophisticated, dynamic, and makes great use of strong visual metaphors as well as subtle expressions and symbols. Although the graphic novel takes a serious look at a profound and difficult subject, humorous moments and ironic hyperbole also organically blend in.

The comic won the Muriel Award 2024 in the categories Best Comic Book, Best Art and Best Script.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

The second part in a thrilling, dramatic series about one of the most remarkable figures from Cold War Czechoslovakia.

A continuation of the series based on the bestselling novel by David Jan Žák, The Return of the King of the Šumava, inspired by real-life events, in which the former border guard Josef Hasil, the legendary King of the Šumava, escapes from a labour camp to Bavaria along with refugees from Czechoslovakia. This makes him a sought-after individual by both sides’ counterintelligence and the Czech secret police, including his adversary Captain Fišer. We find ourselves back in the border region, but also at the headquarters of State Security during the Cold War. Just as thrilling as the first volume and with the same real flesh-and-blood hero.

About the authors

Ondřej Kavalír (1980) is a writer for the magazine Raketa and an editor, dramaturg and translator. He studied political science, history and film science and comparative studies at Charles University in Prague. He worked as editor of the revue Labyrint and for many years as an essayist and film and literary critic for the magazine A2. He is the recipient of a Golden Ribbon for best translation and a Muriel prize for best translated comic book.

Vojtěch Mašek (1977) is a comics writer and artist, author of film screenplays and theatre plays. The film Křižáček (Little Crusader, 2017), which he co-wrote received the main award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Along with Markéta Hajská and Máša Bořkovcová, he created the triptych O přibjehi (2010), commenting on the fate of Czech and Slovak Roma. In 2019, he received three Muriel prizes for the books Sestry Dietlovy (The Dietl Sisters, 2018) and Svatá Barbora (Saint Barbara, 2018). Mašek is also the author of the internet hit Recykliteratura, which builds on the avant-garde tradition of associative montages using photographs and texts found in books and magazines.

Karel Osoha (1991) is one of the leading Czech comics authors. He won the Muriel Award for Best Drawing for Češi 1948: Jak se KSČ chopila moci (Czechs 1948: How the Communist Party Seized Power, 2016). The illustrations for the book Prašina (Dustzone, 2018) and the first volume of the comics trilogy Návrat Krále Šumavy (The Return of the King of the Šumava, 2018) earned him a nomination for the Czech Grand Design Awards.

Playfulness, variety and blasphemy in a sweeping novel with two central storylines.

This novel is built on an irregularly alternating first-person narrative. The two speakers are the persecuted writer Barbora Farná, a pathological liar, and her son, the photographer Marek. They are joined by a lawyer, Vanda, whose relationship with Marek quickly transforms from a professional one into a romantic one, and her husband Alfréd, a wealthy computer-game developer and admirer of the works of Barbora Farná. Upon this narrow stage, Ludvík Němec begins a meta-narrative game of truth, reality and fiction. The fictional worlds created by a compulsion to lie, writerly skill and a gamer’s passion are interspersed with a number of references to real writers and their lives and with a passion for the possibilities of linguistic games. And yet A Woman in Parenthesis is also one of the few high-quality and at the same time thrilling romance novels where there is a distinctive, decisive role for the narrator.

A novel which looks at different forms of home and homelessness, married life and parenthood abroad. About how easy it is to lose your own identity without a home.

The novel The Other Side of Silence not only looks at the home as a place that keeps us anchored, its various forms and the ways it can be lost (homelessness, migration, exile, moving house, temporary accommodation, expulsion) but also at a wide range of social problems: refugees, politics, religion and history, and our prospects for the future. However, it also encompasses the variety of personal relationships that are governed by the interests of multinational corporations, obtrusive family histories, the gulf between continents and the clash between “small and great history”. Memories of places and the experience of them release a flood of nostalgia for an earlier life and people, for the closeness that recedes when we leave a familiar place. The town of L., which bears a striking resemblance to Lyon, where the author lives, is described from several perspectives: that of a nouveau-riche entrepreneur as well as a homeless Czech woman called Anděla.

The framework of the book is provided by the Notes of a Free Young Man, in which a man from L., who is supported by his wife and takes care of the family, decides to write a novel, which takes up about three-quarters of the book. The story he is writing is called The Other Side of Silence. The complex web of thematic threads and the ingenious metatextual game are held together by the detached view of the narrator (the young man).

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.

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.

The debut work by a war correspondent and Czech Television reporter in the Middle East.

Jakub Szántó offers a detailed insider’s account of his experiences as a war correspondent in various corners of the Earth and different types of military conflicts and revolutions. He is professionally dedicated to his work, but he recalls his experiences in a personal rather than objective way. The dramas of front lines, child and juvenile soldiers, famine, destitution and the pain of war or revolution are presented vividly by an eyewitness who spent 20 years of his life experiencing them. The book is valuable not only as a personal testimony but also as a glimpse into the work of a war correspondent, a journalist in situations it is impossible to prepare for. As a history graduate Szántó is also able to set the events he has observed and experienced in the historical context. The tragedy of the events related is softened by humour and irony. The book includes an extensive section of the author’s photographs from the field.

Spiritual and personal, therapeutic and passionate, angry and subdued. The poetry collection Remove a Bone is a collection which can be read in many ways.

After eleven years, the poet Marcela Linhartová has brought out a new poetry collection. It describes painful minor personal tragedies, yet her poetry has a quietness about it which is more than just therapeutic in character. There is much here that is only implied through words; Linhartová always strives for economy of expression, sometimes sounding almost Old Testament in tone. Her poems transcend the individual to become more generally applicable. Are they about the plight of a dissatisfied woman in the modern world? Or more of a dialogue with the world? The poet is not petulantly angry at the world around her. Instead, she directs her silent screams, rage and defiance into her poems. They describe states and crises, and even if they do not give absolution or advice on how to carry on, they can help just by identifying these states. This is a collection which is often expressive and relentless, but from the outset it also expresses the internal struggle between threat and intimacy.

Ondřej Štindl’s best novel to date takes place in Prague during the pandemic and was nominated for the 2023 EU Prize for Literature.

An aging writer and translator, the novel’s protagonist Kryštof abruptly finds himself at a crossroads when he meets the young leftist intellectual Kristýna, and not long afterwards Kamil, a guru with a strange connection to Kryštof’s deceased sister. The emerging pandemic is changing life as he knows it, making the possibility of the world’s end more real than ever—in fact, Kryštof might be headed towards a “personal apocalypse”, plagued by melancholy, the grotesque, intrusive memories and dark forebodings. He becomes a hesitant actor in what is either a story of great revelation or a cruel cosmic joke. Or a love story.

A chillingly realistic YA sci-fi dystopia from a world of war, environmental destruction and migration

Fourteen-year-old Jony spends his time like most of the other “juniors”: in the safety of a Europe which is cut off from the rest of the world by a massive wall; he goes to a school where the teaching is done mostly using virtual reality, and in his free time he browses online games. He lets his life be run by the System, which knows what is best for everyone, what they should eat, drink, experience and feel. But then things begin to happen which force him to take off his rose-tinted digital spectacles. The teacher František Tichý has moved away from the Terezín Ghetto of his previous books (Transport to Eternity, 2017, Magnesia Litera Award; The Labyrinth of Endless Encounters, 2020), and in this final book of his loose trilogy he ventures forth to a dystopian world in the near future where freedom and individuality are completely subservient to the dictates of the Orwellian state machinery and the System. This gripping story manages to pose complex questions about the relationship between individual freedom and personal responsibility, and the limits and dangers of “enhancing” technologies. What impresses the most is the detailed worldbuilding of a believable future, elegantly captured in Stanislav Setinský’s illustrations, and a hypermodern language which Tichý imbues with Anglicisms both existing and invented by the author.

Age 13+

Read an excerpt from the book here.