Female authors

Mlčení přichází jako první

The Silence Comes First. Silence can often hurt more than words or a slap in the face. A novel about four generations of women whose relationships are stifled by the unspoken. Dora balances between her manipulative mother, her teenage daughter, her own insecurity, and loneliness. In an emotionally cold environment, she has learned to dream, but not to act. When she finds an online acquaintance and the man decides to visit, Dora stands on the threshold of a decision—to face her fear, break the silence, and finally find her own voice.

Chovanci

Evgenija Berkovich

Pets. The novel is a fantastic allegory, which the author herself describes as a “prison fairy tale.” With extraordinary exaggeration, linguistic inventiveness, and satire, the author depicts life behind bars—but from the perspective of animals. The text could be described as a kind of allegorical fable that explores the world of a women’s prison colony through the stories of its animal inhabitants – mainly cats, but also crows, dogs, and rats. The main character is the free-spirited Cat (Kotan), who leads a gang in the prison yard.

Obušky a chačapuri

Zápisky z Gruzie

Eva Karlíková

To be published: Q2 2026

Batons and Khachapuri. Notes from Georgia. From September 2024 to September 2025, Georgia underwent a transformation—from a young democracy with a pro-European orientation to a state ruled by a single party, where fear, censorship, and the systematic elimination of the opposition reign supreme. In the space of a single year, a gradual but relentless transformation took place. The book follows how the change took place – month by month. The author is a young Czech woman who spent a year in Georgia as a researcher, but instead of doing her usual fieldwork, she witnessed a dramatic social upheaval.

Ta, která nebyla

Boileau-Narcejac

She Who Was No More. Fernand Ravinel can no longer bear the suffocating life his wife Mireille imposes on him in their modest house in Enghien, north of Paris. He allows himself to be persuaded by his mistress, the doctor Lucienne, to kill his unbearable wife.

After putting her to sleep with sleeping pills obtained by Lucienne, Ravinel submerges Mireille in the bathtub to make it look like drowning. The murder takes place in Nantes, and forty-eight hours later, Ravinel transports the body to Enghien and stores it in the laundry room on his property to make it look like an accident. However, when the body is to be “discovered” by a third person, whom Ravinel deliberately brings there, the body is nowhere to be found. Gradually, his anxiety, compounded by remorse, intensifies when it begins to seem that the dead woman has returned to haunt Ravinel…

Co myslíš, co vidí

Alena Machoninová

What do you think he sees. What happens when you bring a stray dog home? You feel like you’ve saved him. But what does he think about it? He declares war on you. Perhaps because the country you live in is actually at war, and suddenly everyone’s lives are filled with constant tension and movement. You begin to realize that the dog didn’t need this at all. He could have lived peacefully on the grounds of a bankrupt factory. But you decided to rescue him. And so you have no choice but to ask how he perceives the situation and repeat, along with the heroes of Alena Machoninová’s novel-essay: “What do you think he sees?”

Zástava dechu

Lucie Koudelková Jesenská

Respiratory arrest. The novel resonates in a colourful and multi-layered way with the contemporary societal theme of how to be a good mother. The whirlwind of events during a single day in the life of a mother of two young children, between tender moments of parental love, heated conflicts and sheer exhaustion, are accompanied by metaphors and images of a time when women walked the world with bared breasts and drank water from springs, in short, of a time when a child’s mother was an entire community, long before plastic jungles and playgrounds.

Step

Oksana Vasyakina

The Steppe. In the hot summer of 2010, when the European part of Russia was engulfed by fires, a 20-year-old girl arrives from Siberia to meet her father, whom she hasn’t seen for ten years. Together they set off on a long journey in his truck and their destination is the untamed steppe in the south of the country. The father, who considers this inhospitable expanse his home and only possession, would like to share it with his grown daughter. However, the taiga-born girl is rather frightened by the open landscape and finds it strange.

Věk Rudých Mravenců

Tanya Pyankova

The Age of Red Ants. This title is the fourth novel of Taňa Pjankova. It tells a story about the so-called Holodomor period, i.e. Ukrainian famine, that took place between 1932 and 1933. The story follows three main characters – Dusya, Svyryd and Solya – whose fates are the result of almost three years of studying archival materials. As the author herself states, they are not fictitious characters. In addition to this three storylines, the author also handles the contrast between the dying traditional village and the Soviet system, interestingly working with the embodiment of Hunger as an allegorical figure.

Vespod

Béatrice Kahn

Under. The compelling prose Les Dessous (Underwear, 2020) follows three different girls, all of them on the cusp of adulthood. In a small French town in 1963, Elisabeth, hidden under a café table, listens to adult conversations. It’s the day of her friend Thérese’s funeral and she is also reading the diary of Henriette, a Jewish girl, who suffered persecution during the war. Secrets kept undisclosed in the French post-war small town are gradually coming to light. The world of teenage girls is confronted with the adult world, with war and collaboration, conformity and social violence, with large and small betrayals.

Pastýřka snů

Příběh první české letkyně

Iva Tajovská

Shepherdess of Dreams.The story of the first Czech female aviator. Iva Tajovská’s latest novel takes us back to the beginning of the 20th century, to the time of the first aviators and promoters of aviation, Jan Kašpar and Eugen Čihák. The story of Božena Langerová is less known to the public, but all the more interesting, as she was the first Czech woman and the thirteenth woman in the world, to fly a plane. The takeoffs and the downfalls of her “butterfly” serve as a metaphor for the events in her life. In the beginning, Božena is confronted with the male prejudice against women in technical fields and also with the disapproval of her mother, who pressures her to live up to her traditional role.

Autobiografie jednoho pařížského domu

Příběhy, osudy a deportace 1942–1944

Ruth Zylberman

The Autobiography of a Parisian House. Stories, Fates and Deportations 1942–1944. At number 209 rue Saint-Maurus in the 10th arrondissement of Paris there is an apartment building where families of craftsmen and workers, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, have lived since the 1850s. Generations have grown up here, love and friendships have been forged and daily life has been regularly interrupted by the disasters and violence of the 20th century. Among others, nine Jewish children were deported from here in the 1940s. Their fates are the key to the author’s magnificent novel’s testimony about the memory of places and the invisible threads that connect the living and the dead.

V osamění

Dorothy B. Hughes

In a Lonely Place. Psychological noir fiction with a criminal theme, which depicts post-war Los Angeles and the life of the upper middle class. The protagonist, Dix Steele, is a former World War II pilot living off his uncle’s money. At first, he appears to be merely someone, who is overly concerned with his appearance and places great emphasis on his own importance, but after meeting his former war buddy Brub, his wife Sylvia and after the encounter with an actress called Laurel, it becomes clear, that he can hardly control his aggression and resentment towards his own fate…