Petra Hulova

Alex Zucker

Alta, Zaya, Nara, Oyuna and Dolgorna - a mother, three sisters, and the teenage daughter of one of the sisters - each tell their pieces of the family story, an epic fraught with secrets and betrayals, in All This Belongs to Me, the debut novel of Petra Hulova. All This Belongs to Me transports the reader from Mongolia's harsh, dusty steppe to the clamor and grime of the capital, Ulaanbantar; from nomanic herding and felt tents to brothels and prefab apartment blocks. With a filmic eye and a dead-on ear, Hulova vividly conveys the landscapes and lives of three generations of women. Two of the sisters, born illegitimately of their mother's clandestine affairs with foreigners - one Chinese, one Russian - struggle with the stigma of being half-breeds, while the strict division of male and female labor and social roles plays out in the city and country alike, with devastating consequences.

A Novel

All This Belongs to Me

Petra Hůlová

Movement

Jáchym Topol

Winner of the Egon Hostovský Prize as the best Czech book of the year, this epic novel powerfully captures the sense of dislocation that followed the Czechs’ newfound freedom in 1989. More than just the story of its young protagonist—who is part businessman, part gang member, part drifter—it is a novel that includes terrifying dream scenes, Czech and American Indian legends, a nightmarish Eastern European flea market, comic scenes about the literary world, and an oddly tender story of the love between the protagonist and his spiritual sister.

City Sister Silver

Heda Margolius Kovaly

Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator and political exile Heda Margolius Kovly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague: her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution and her own persecution at his disgrace, into a smart and evocative psychological thriller-cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself.

Innocence

Patrik Ouředník

Following the success of 2005's Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Patrik Ouředník again confounds expectations with what seems, on the surface, to be a detective novel...

Alex Zucker

About

Books

Join the club