The final novel of acclaimed Czech fiction writer Jan Balabán.

Ask Your Dad centers on what Christian tradition calls “the last things.” Three siblings struggle to come to terms with the death of their father, the doctor Jan Nedoma, while also confronting a posthumous accusation made by his best friend, who accuses Nedoma of having collaborated with communist authorities. The bitter irony at the heart of the novel is that it is no longer possible for the siblings to ask their father what really happened. Questions of meaning, moral integrity, and the consequences of human actions permeate the meditative novel and are rendered with a harrowing directness. Poignantly, the novel was published posthumously.

Jan Balabán (1961–2010) was a Czech novelist, short-story writer, and translator. Among his most acclaimed works are the story collection Maybe We're Leaving and the novel Ask Your Dad, which was published in Czech shortly after his death and awarded the Czech Republic’s Book of the Year Prize in 2010. Balabán died in 2010 at the age of forty-nine, leaving behind a body of work that established him as one of the leading Central European writers of his generation. Graeme Dibble is a translator from Scotland who first visited Czechoslovakia in 1990 and has lived in the Czech Republic since 2007. He collaborated with Jiří Zahrádka on a series devoted to Leoš Janáček’s operas. Together with his wife, he has translated short stories by Marek Šindelka, which have appeared in The Stinging Fly, Guernica, B O D Y, and Apofenie, and Marek Torčík’s novel Memory Burn. 

Ask Your Dad
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