An extensive novel by an award-winning writer inspired by the author's stays in China. Magnesia Litera - Best Book of 2018
A Czech businessman, his wife and teenage daughter, a Russian diplomat, a French writer, an American calligraphy student and many other heroes and their family traumas.
Midlife crisis, burnout or puberty. Pilgrims and travelers who have gone to China to clean up their lives, but their world continues to fall apart. They are irretrievably losing something, but they are unable to acknowledge their situation. They are looking for a fixed point in a past life, but they don't know what to remember. A dramatic turning point occurs not only in their private stories, something fundamental is broken and changed in the fates of all of us.
The old world of Europe is ending and no one knows what is beginning. And just as each of the characters in the novel experiences the liminal situation as an existential and personal experience, we all experience the "hour of lead" together. People are retreating into themselves and an era of resigned apathy, demoralisation, an era of grey totalitarian consumerist everyday life is dawning. But there is still agency. It's just important to watch the signs.
They wrote about Hours of Lead
"Radka Denemarková has found a new language that expresses the difficult moments of disintegration and uncertainty within and around us with an urgency that engages and captivates the reader. "
HOST Publishing House
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Radka Denemarková
She graduated from the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. She worked as a researcher at the Institute for Czech Literature of the CAS, and also as a lecturer and dramaturge at the Na zábradlí Theatre.
She has been a freelance writer since 2004. She published the monograph Evald Schorm - An Enemy to Himself (1998), edited the anthology The Golden Sixties (2000). In 2005, her prose debut And I Still Who's Beating was published. Her second novel, Money from Hitler (2006), won the Magnesia Literary Award for Prose Fiction and other awards abroad. Her novel monograph Smrt, nebudeš se báti aneb Příběh Petra Lébla (2008) and her translation of Herta Müllerová's Rozhoupaný dech were also awarded the Magnesia Literary Prize. In 2011, her novel Kobold (Excess of Tenderness. Human surplus) and in 2014 Contribution to the History of Joy.
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