Crystal Key I - Falknovská hut
The saga of the Heřman family in the heart of North Bohemia
Vlastimil Vondruška's new historical saga is set in the period from the Thirty Years' War to the revolutionary year of 1848, when serfdom was abolished as the last bastion of feudalism. This extensive six-volume chronicle tells the story of the fate of the Heřman glassmaking family against the background of life in northern Bohemia, which underwent an unprecedented economic rise at the end of feudalism and later an equally rapid decline. The name "Crystal Key" symbolizes the family secret that has been passed down from generation to generation in the Heřman family, and at the same time the hill is the dominant feature of Nový Bor.
In 1690, young Leopold Heřman came to North Bohemia from Šumava with his father Ignác, who became a master in the Křížová hut in Svor. Although old Ignatius does not have much money, he has great wealth - he knows how to melt clear crystal glass. And he guards his secret closely. He gets into an acrimonious dispute with the owner of the smelter and eventually has to leave it. He then makes a deal with the owner of the nearby glassworks in Falknov, to whom he reveals the secret, on the condition that his son Leopold marries his daughter Maria and with her acquires an ownership share in the glassworks.
Vlastimil Vondruska
He studied history and ethnography at Charles University in Prague, worked at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and then at the National Museum in Prague. About 50 scientific studies and the first short stories date from that time. For over thirty years he has been a mountaineer. After the revolution in 1989, he founded a glassworks where he produced copies of historical glass. At that time he returned to writing fiction and has been a freelance writer since 2007. To date, he has published some 70 historical novels and detective stories, several children's books and, together with his wife, 20 popular history books. According to statistics from the National Library, he has been the most widely read Czech author for many years, selling nearly two million printed books and over 100,000 audiobooks, and several titles have been published abroad. He is also the author of the screenplay for the film In the Name of the King, as well as a writer of radio and stage plays. He has received numerous literary awards (e.g. the IBBY Award, the Czech Learned Society Award, the Honorary Award of the Mensa, the MOBA Readers' Prize). His novel The Hussite Epic won the Bestseller of the Year title in 2015. He also writes journalism, for which he received the Kramer Prize from the Association of Independent Media. In 2017, he received a state award for literature from President Miloš Zeman.
Specifications
Basic
Format & type of protection
| Code: | EK30251 |
| Manufacturer information |
Moravská Bastei MOBA s.r.o, Koliště 13a, Brno 60200, Česká republika, 541 246 978, www.mobaknihy.cz, [email protected] 
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