Sailing ships on vignettes

She only knew her story and felt ashamed of it and had no desire to tell it to anyone." Would anyone still be interested in a woman my age? muses Marie, a forty-seven-year-old associate professor of literature, who has been forced by circumstances to retreat into isolation. She has been caught up in a banal tragicomedy that she has read and lectured about thousands of times as a specialist, but after the betrayal of her husband and the departure of her adult daughter, she is experiencing this cliché firsthand. When she returns to the Krumlov region for the summer to help her sick parents and reconcile with her quietly aggressive sister, she tries to trace the reasons why she uprooted and alienated herself so much on a rescue cruise into her own past. But who will she confide in when her rural peers behave like Stroupežnický's furiants summoning thunderbolts at the intruder from Prague and the well-read boy from the bookstore in Krumlov is desperately young again?

The psychological novel by the sought-after Czech author, like the lament Fish Blood, subtly empathises with a woman in crisis. With a light summer note, Jiří Hájíček masks his persistent interest in the traumas of his native land and adds a serious theme that has captivated many a classic of world fiction: how to do a reboot in life when a 180 degree turn is not possible?