To be published: Q2 2025
You won’t get away. In the Christmas time, two boys hanging out in Prague’s Anděl district have their lives changed when a quick burglary turns into a terrifying encounter with an organised drug trafficking group. At the same time, a new client comes to private detective Kob – she wants to track down her son at any cost.
Stalin, Hitler a příběh jedné vražedné aliance 1939–1941
To be published: Q1 2024
The Pact. Stalin, Hitler and the Story of a Murderous Alliance 1939–1941. Hitler’s alliance with Stalin, known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, was not only a temporary armstice between the two totalitarian world powers but practically enabled the Nazi Germany to start the World War II by attacking Poland and simultaneously enabled the Stalinist Soviet Union to occupy the Baltic states and after the war with Finland a part of its territory, too. Thus during the first twenty-two months of the World War II the collaboration of the two dictators changed the political situation on the whole continent fundamentally.
aneb židovská dobrodružství křesťanského chlapce, když skončilo šoa
To be published: Q4 2024
Gojele. The Jewish adventures of a Christian boy after the end of Shoah. Gojele is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells a story of a twelve-year-old German boy. After World War II, owing to administrative oversight, the boy found himself with his mother in northern Moravia. It was a place in the former Sudetenland (Weidenitz – Vidnava) near the Polish border, where Jews returning from concentration camps were gathered before they were supposed to move to Palestine. Meanwhile, the intended destination for the boy and his mother was actually one of the gathering places for Sudeten Germans before their expulsion from Czechoslovakia (Weidenau – Vidnice).
To be published: Q2 2025
Breathlessness. 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.
To be published: Q2 2025
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 alien.
To be published: Q2 2025
Grimbosq. In June 1721, the French architect Étienne Grimbosq arrives in Petersburg with his wife and daughter. He was hired by Peter the Great to build a palace for his Chamberlain Romashkin. The new city, built on marshes without solid foundations, is the work of Peter the Great, built more or less on command. The Tsar left patriarchal Moscow and moved his court far north to St Petersburg, forcing everyone to build a house there according to the plans laid down by the state administration and to attend various eccentric festivals under threat of fines, reminiscent without exaggeration of Peter Breughel’s Kermeses and Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
To be published: Q3 2025
Mother Odessa. In addition to its literary qualities, the novel Mama Odessa presents a view of the turbulent fate of Jews in the 20th century. It tells the story of a Russian-Jewish family from Odessa and artfully connects different time periods: Odessa during World War II, including the massacre of Odessa’s Jews in 1941, the late Stalinist period when the KGB persecuted the narrator’s father, emigration, and the present.
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.
Ukrajina, Polsko a scestí ruských dějin
The Curse of the Empire. Ukraine, Poland and the Straits of Russian History. This well-founded work by a leading German historian aims to illuminate from a historical perspective the current aggressive Russian war and anti-Western Russian attitudes with their historical roots. It traces the dynamics of Russian empire-building over the last three hundred years or so, i.e. since the time of Peter the Great. It is not, however, a study of local conflicts – the author places them in the broader European context and explains the interplay, cooperation or competition of the major powers, paying particular attention to the long-standing cooperation between Russia and Germany, the unfortunate consequences of which were evident until recently.
Underwear. 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.
Příběh první české letkyně
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.
Příběh maďarského povstání 1956
Twelve Days. The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. The book is a day-by-day account of the defining moment of the Cold War – the inspiring but brutally crushed Hungarian Uprising. His book incorporates newly released official documents and archive material, family diaries, and eyewitness testimony. We witness the thrilling first days when – armed only with a few rifles, petrol bombs, and desperate courage – the people of Budapest rose up against their Soviet masters and nearly succeeded.
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