Nightwork

Description

One night in 1968, on the eve of the Russian invasion, 13 year-old Ondrej 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.

J.CHYM TOPOL is an award-winning writer who was famous in his youth as an underground poet, songwriter and journalist, and now for writing books that have successfully and imaginatively captured the dislocation brought about by the fall of Communism. His novels include Gargling with Tar (Portobello, 2010), and The Devil's Workshop, which won the 2013 English PEN Award for Writing in Translation.

A delightfully haunting work... [It] revels in the strangeness of life and language. The book's poetry and ghostly voices bring to mind Under Milk Wood... Bold and brilliant -- Jethro Soutar * Independent *