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An intimate story of otherness and care by a major voice in Slovak literature.

For more than three decades, Jana Bodnárová has been one of Slovak literature’s most distinctive voices, writing with a lyricism that is at once tender and unflinchingly harsh. Patchwork in White is a brief yet powerful novel that stitches together fragments of lives bound by intimacy, difference, and care, set against the social fabric of Czechoslovakia from the mid-1950s to the present.

At the center of the novel are Ota and Andrej, a couple whose shared memories unfold through shards of childhood, marriage, and parenthood. Their lives are irrevocably shaped by the decision to adopt albino twins—children marked by abuse and exclusion because of their otherness. As these fragments accumulate, the novel becomes a meditation on motherhood, femininity, love, and the quiet imminence of death.

Poetic, restrained, and brutally honest, Bodnárová’s prose finds resonance in what is left unsaid. Illustrations by Eva Moflárová deepen the book’s emotional texture, creating a work of rare intimacy and moral force.

This is a collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, bittersweet stories of life among the inhabitants of the Little Quarter of nineteenth-century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth-century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Prague becoming ever more aware of itself as a Czech rather than an Austrian city.

Prague Tales is a classic by a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers, including Ivan Klíma, who contributes an introduction to this new translation.