Seven books that put you in Czechia. Six are by writers from Czechia and set there, starting with Closely Observed Trains and The Joke. The other is a wider pick, by someone who knows the place well.
Czechia's Nobel laureate in literature is the Prague poet Jaroslav Seifert, honoured in 1984. Prague was also home to Franz Kafka, who wrote in German, and Czech writing has a Romantic landmark in Karel Hynek Mácha's poem May, published in 1836. Under communism, many writers were banned from print and passed work around as samizdat, typed copies shared hand to hand. Occupation, Stalinism and censorship run through much later fiction.
Kafka's The Trial, a nightmare of faceless bureaucracy, draws on the Habsburg legal world of early twentieth-century Bohemia. Milan Kundera's The Joke traces how a careless joke wrecks lives in Stalinist-era Moravia. Bohumil Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude has a Prague paper-compactor rescuing forbidden books from the waste paper he crushes in a cellar. In Ivan Klíma's Love and Garbage, a banned writer works as a Prague street sweeper.
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A young railway dispatcher's coming of age at a small Bohemian station during Nazi occupation, blending comedy, sex and resistance.
Novel of Stalinist-era Czechoslovakia and its aftermath, tracing how political conformity and a careless joke wreck lives in Moravia.
A waiter's rise and fall through Prague hotels across the 1930s, occupation and communist takeover, told with picaresque humour.
A Prague paper-compactor saves forbidden books in a cellar, capturing communist-era censorship and the city's intellectual underground.
Prague-born Kafka's nightmare of faceless bureaucracy, rooted in the Habsburg legal world of early twentieth-century Bohemia.
A banned writer working as a Prague street sweeper reflects on love, dissidence and life under late communism.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Czechia.
A Prague collector of Meissen porcelain in the Cold War, and the cramped, watchful life of the old city.
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