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Necklace/Choker

then, meanwhile, now./a small novel in fragments/

Jana Bodnárová author Jonathan Gresty translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Seagull Books London Ltd

Published:28th Jan '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Necklace/Choker cover

An engrossing novel about the lives in a small Slovak town during the tumultuous twentieth century.

In this highly acclaimed novel, Jana Bodnárová offers an engrossing portrayal of a small Slovak town and its inhabitants in the north of the country against the backdrop of the tumultuous history of the twentieth century. As Sara, the protagonist of Necklace/Choker, returns to her native town after many years in exile to sell the old family house and garden, she begins to piece together her family’s history from snippets and fragments of her own memory and the diaries of her artist father, Imro. A talented painter, he survived the Holocaust only to be crushed by the constraints imposed on his art by Stalinist censorship, and Sara herself was later driven into exile after dreams of socialism with a human face were shattered by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
 
Through their stories, and that of Sara’s friend, Iboja, the daughter of a hotelier, readers will be immersed in key moments of Slovak history and their bearing on the people in this less familiar part of Central Europe.

“By creating a complex composition of fragments depicting various periods in the stories of two friends, Sára and Iboja, and their loved ones, and by blending several stories and gradually revealing their secrets in a sophisticated way, the author paints an almost seamless fresco of a town grappling with the demands and cruelties of its epoch while trying to cling to their dignity.” -- Robert Kotian (praise for original Slovak edition)

ISBN: 9780857428905

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 23mm

Weight: 399g

172 pages