Kolem Jakuba

Five stories link the fates of ordinary people to a single spot in the landscape, the Jakub pond on the border of central and eastern Bohemia, surrounded by forest, with the small hamlet of Poušť on its banks. In 1639 the horrors of the Thirty Years' War drive three children into the woods, left to survive on their own. Later, a farmer in the hamlet is threatened by the presence of the Red Army at the end of the Second World War, and a political prominent is overtaken by revolutionary justice in the show trials of the 1950s. Motifs and family names recur from story to story, and in the last one, set in the 1990s, the ghosts of the earlier tales seem to return in altered form.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Short stories

Length

175 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, War (assigned by AI)

Set in

Czechia, 1639 to the 1990s

First published

2019 by Argo

Author's age

43 when first published

ISBN

9788025729335 (original)