Czech Books | All stories

Karel Čapek’s last major novel, War with the Newts, is considered a satirical dystopian masterpiece, both prescient and timeless, uniquely Czech and yet universal. Like much of his work, the book can be read on many levels while its structure transcends standard genres. On the surface, it’s a work of science fiction about how a species of giant, intelligent newts – docile by nature – are ruthlessly exploited, and finally turn on their human oppressors. Along the way, Čapek gently pillories science and journalism (two of his principal preoccupations),

Eduard Bass’ The Chattertooth Eleven, a novel about a father who brought up his eleven sons as a phenomenal football team, is one of the famous Czech works of fiction. It was published in 1922, the same year that saw the establishment of the Czechoslovak Football Association, by a former singer and cabaret director from Prague and has since enchanted generations of young and adult readers. The book was translated into English already in 1943. Its second English edition was published by Karolinum Press in 2008.

Marketa Lazarová by Vladislav Vančura is a masterpiece of Czech interwar modernism, praised for its experimental use of language. The epic tale, set in an unspecified time in medieval Bohemia, depicts a feud between two families of petty noblemen and celebrates courage, honour and love, which undermines social and religious conventions. The novel was first published in 1931, but only saw its English translation in 2016.

Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk is a classic of not just Czech but world literature. Is soldier Josef Švejk employing exaggerated zeal to cunningly mock the Austro-Hungarian army’s war effort? Or is he genuinely slow-witted? The 1920s comic masterpiece leaves it to the reader to decide.

Essayist, educator and debut novelist René Georg Vasicek was conceived in communist-era Czechoslovakia, born in Austria a year after the Soviet-led invasion of his parents’ homeland, and raised in the pine barrens of eastern Long Island, New York. His novel The Defectors is a self-described book of odd and uncanny episodes about people, many of them Czechs, trying not just to escape reality but “defect” from it.

The Grandmother by Božena Němcová is an iconic work in Czech literature. The novel about an idealized rural community in the early 19th century, written in the days of the national revival, marks the beginning of Czech prose. First published in 1855, it has been reissued 300 times and translated into numerous languages to reach readers the world over.

This summer, director and screenwriter Ivan Fíla’s historical novel about Dr. František Kriegel – the only Prague Spring leader not to sign the Moscow Protocol validating the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia – became a bestseller. That success led Fíla to return to a “fairy tale thriller” film script he’d set aside long ago and turn it into a novel.

With three books published just last year, Marek Toman is currently one of the most prolific Czech authors. He last spoke to Radio Prague almost three years ago after he published a novel narrated by a building – Černín Palace, seat of the Czech Foreign Ministry. Since then, he has written two other novels closely connected to historical Prague. When we met up I asked him what it was about Prague and its particular districts that inspired him to write whole books about them.

Earlier this year the Czech Republic marked the 80th anniversary of the Munich Agreement, signed in September 1938 by the leaders of Germany, France, Great Britain, and Italy, resulting in the annexation of the Sudetenland by Nazi Germany. Radio Prague’s David Vaughan recently published a book in the UK titled “Hear My Voice”, most of which is set in Czechoslovakia in the months preceding the Munich agreement. Its narrator is an interpreter for the international press corps in Prague and he watches the events of 1938 unfold in Central Europe as

When the novel The Glass Room by the British writer Simon Mawer was published in 2009 it was an instant hit, and it was no surprise when it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The book was widely discussed in the Czech Republic as it revolves around the story of one this country’s most remarkable twentieth century buildings, the Villa Tugendhat in Brno. This was not Simon Mawer’s first novel set in the city. Over a decade earlier he wrote Mendel’s Dwarf, which took its inspiration from Gregor Mendel, one of the fathers of genetics and the