Boat Number Five

Jarka is twelve and lives on the edge of Bratislava with her very young mother, who was a teenager when Jarka was born and has never shown her love or attention; her grandmother, scarred by her husband's emigration, refuses to be called grandmother. Left alone for long hours in the flat, Jarka roams the housing estate. Everything changes when she takes a pram with six-month-old twins and hides with them in a garden cottage. Together with Kristián, an eight-year-old who has run away from home, she decides to look after the babies and so creates the substitute family she has always dreamed of: children who grow up too early, fleeing those closest to them to build a hidden world of their own.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

279 pages in the original

Genres

Family, Coming of age (assigned by AI)

Set in

Slovakia

First published

2010 by Koloman Kertész Bagala

Author's age

31 when first published

ISBN

9788081080180 (original)

9780857428899 (Seagull Books, United Kingdom)