This slim but dense novel is the story of a middle-aged teacher who is employed by a local Mafia boss to teach his drop-out 20-year-old daughter some creative writing.

Beata embraces lover after lover as well as political causes new to Eastern Europe: the environment, animal rights, feminism, consumerism, new-age religion. The book gives a gritty but witty portrait of today's Prague, its mafiosi and their ex-secret police bodyguards, the expatriate Americans, and many an extraordinary Czech, from a cremation enthusiast to a hopelessly naïve sex-education teacher.

The narrator, himself a writer and teacher who is in love with Beata, must portray her fate in terms that explain her nihilism without losing faith in his own positive craft of story-telling.

The unusual structure of the book, with its many post-modernist quotes from other writers, also serves as a serious exploration of the changed role of the writer in Central and Eastern Europe today. This comical-tragical-sexual tale is told in the best Czech tradition of Milan Kundera, Ivan Klíma, Bohumil Hrabal and Ludvík Vaculík.

“Brilliant satire of modern-day Prague.” —ALA Booklist

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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