World prose

Step

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.

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…

Kůže

Evgenia Nekrasova

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Skin. The novel written by the young Russian writer Evgenia Nekrasova is a story of two women, a black slave from the South of the U.S.A. and a Russian serf whose life stories overlap.

In the South of the U.S.A. a female slave is born and named Hope. Her mother tries to save her from the same fate as she herself has faced. However, they get separated and the new owner takes Hope away from America. Meanwhile in Russia a girl named Domna is born into a serf family and, being the youngest daughter, is cherished and spoilt. Than one day a carriage takes her away – her owner lost her in cards.

Rána

Oksana Vasyakina

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Wound. The prosaic debut by the poet Oksana Vasyakina is a documentary, autobiographic text which turns around the author’s journey with her mother’s ashes from the Volgograd region to her native Siberia.

Král Sobol aneb putování Mórice Beňovského

Jean-Christophe Rufin

King Sable’s Trip Around the World. The novel is inspired by the life and the memoirs of the traveler Maurice Benyovszky (1746-1786), who is considered a national hero in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia.

Život za život

Maylis de Kerangal

Mend the Living. Since her birth the prominent French author has been close to the sea and she projected her passion powered by her literary mastership into the novel aptly titled by an emblematic quotation from Anton Chekhov’s drama Platonov.

Zbloudění

Amin Maalouf

The Disoriented. One night, a phone rings in Paris. Adam learns that Mourad, once his closest friend, is dying. He quickly throws some clothes in a suitcase and takes the first flight out, to the homeland he fled twenty-five years ago. Exiled in France, Adam has been leading a peaceful life as a respected historian, but back among the milk-white mountains of the East his past soon catches up with him.

Pozdní navrátilec

Novely a povídky

Mavis Gallant

The Latehomecomer. In this selection of 13 stories which were published in The New Yorker, Gallant shows herself to be one of the century’s most accomplished, and least conventional, writers of short fiction.

Já Tituba, černá čarodějnice ze Salemu

Maryse Condé

I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem. This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age.