Under the snow

The author proves once again that she is rightly considered one of the most significant figures in contemporary Czech literature

A seemingly normal situation: Three sisters get in the car one winter day and go to their parents' house to celebrate their father's birthday. Blanka with two daughters, a baby and a dog, Olina with her son and a tablet, Kristýna with a hangover. However, their life stories, childhood memories, unfulfilled dreams and frustrations are all in the same car with them, and after just a few kilometres of driving, the seven-seater Volvo XC turns into a packed paperback that threatens to explode at any moment. And none of the sisters know that more drama awaits them at their parents' house.

In family relationships and seemingly ordinary events, Soukupová manages to capture the imprints of tangled fates, ancient experiences and frustrations with such bravura that they emerge before the reader as unique life dramas. The author's typical narrative style with feigned casualness and unspectacularity underlines the authenticity of the story and draws the reader into it so much that he becomes one of the passengers in the car going to the family party.

"Soukupová is a brilliant author: where the stories would tempt sentimentality, it is as cold as a surgeon's scalpel. "
Vladimir Karfík, Xantypa
"And I would have said that stories of just who is with whom and against whom, stories of just interpersonal relationships, are actually still about the same thing. And lo and behold, they're not. Nobody writes them like Soukupová. "
Petra Hůlová, Respekt
"Petra Soukupová has managed to make much out of little in Under the Snow. In a reduced space, she portrayed not only the intertwined lives of three, or rather four women, but also the drama of human everyday life drowned in frog wars, number crunching, selfishness and misunderstanding. It is a world that is oppressive, suffocated by itself - but fascinatingly formed. "
Markéta Kittlová, iLiteratura.cz

Petra Soukupová (*1982)

She studied screenwriting and dramaturgy at FAMU. Already her prose debut To the Sea (2007) attracted a lot of attention among critics and readers. He has been nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award, the Josef Škvorecký Award and the Jiří Orten Award. A triptych of short stories Zmizet (2009) won the main prize Magnesia Litera - Book of the Year in 2010. Her books have already been published in translation in four countries, Slovenia, Poland, Italy and Bulgaria. Since 2011, she has worked as a dramaturg on the TV series Ulice, and as a scriptwriter on the sitcom Comeback (2008-2010). After the birth of her daughter Marla in 2013, she wrote her first book for children's readers Bertík a čmuchadlo (2014).