A house split in half

A novel about free-spirited women and poachers, textile merchants and spiritists, set in a Sudeten village in the first half of the 20th century. Czechs and Germans live here in mixed marriages, but they also haggle over which nationality to declare in the census, who will build a new school first, and who murdered whose dog named Masaryk. < br> It's a story of secret loves, escapes, wrongs, name changes and surnames, and frog wars that ultimately cost lives. The author weaves a large "famílienroman" from family stories, memories and archival records, alternating male and female voices and fantasy with quotations. She was inspired to write the novel by her own broken family: After 1945, some of her relatives were deported and some remained. One of her ancestors even became an arranger of a Jewish factory and a friend of Reinhard Heydrich. < br> < br> Alice Horáček's novel The House Split in Two reads like a thrilling chronicle in one breath. Both Czech and German were spoken in the Krkonoše Mountains, the fates of families met, intertwined and intersected. And you can feel it all in this extraordinary book. The name can evoke something broken, lost. But it is exactly the opposite. Thanks to this extraordinary book, the shattered past comes together and a plastic and holistic picture of it emerges. < br> < br> Jaroslav Rudiš < br> < br> The publication of the book was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.