Nightwork
Published on 1. May 2014
978-1-84627-541-8 (ISBN)
Description
One night in 1968, on the eve of the Soviet invasion, 13 year-old Ondra and his younger brother Kamil are bundled into a coach bound for their father's birthplace, a mountainous, forested village in northern Bohemia. But when they arrive it becomes clear that this escape promises its own perils, and the boys find themselves stranded in a rural community riven with petty suspicion and stained by prejudice, a borderland over which fleeing peoples, victims of genocide, and trigger-happy armies regularly tramp. Growing up in this dark, chaotic landscape, the two boys struggle to make a home for themselves, until a series of unexplained deaths push them to make bold decisions to ensure their survival.
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Person
Jachym Topol is the leading Czech author of his generation. Famous in his youth as an underground poet and songwriter, since the Velvet Revolution he has written the books that have most successfully and imaginatively captured the dislocation brought about by the fall of communism. His novels include Gargling with Tar, which was published by Portobello in 2011, The Devil's Workshop (Portobello 2013), which won the 2013 English PEN Award for Writing in Translation, and Nightworks (Portobello 2014).http://www.englishpen.org/english-pen-awards-for-writing-in-translation-2013-announced/
