Wormwood and Vanilla

I want to wait until the other customers have gone, I want to be the very last one. But I can't. The shop assistant asks me what I want, and I reply: “A litre of milk, half a loaf of bread, half a block of butter. Yeast and matches as well.” Towards the end, my voice drops and I whisper: “Mummy asks if I could get it on credit.”

She started writing when she was sixty. She left nothing out. A childhood spent in poverty, despair and a lack of love, moving between children's homes, but also the years when she looked for hope and found inner strength. Eva Vondráčková's autobiographical novel took ten years to write and was supplemented with commentaries by her daughter, Daniela. From memories and period photographs, they pieced together the seemingly small, yet universal story of one family against the backdrop of modern Czech history.