LONGLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2020’A hint of Lynch, a touch of Ferrante, the stylish languor of a Lana del Rey song … Moskovich writes sentences that lilt and slink, her plots developing as a slow seduction and then clouding like a smoke-filled room.’ GuardianZorka. She had eyebrows like her name.1980s Prague. Just before Jana’s seventh birthday, a new family moves in to their building: a bird-eyed mamka in a fox-fur coat, a stubble-faced papka – and a raven-haired girl named Zorka. As the first cracks begin to appear in the communist regime, Zorka teaches Jana to look beyond their building, beyond Prague, beyond Czechoslovakia … and then, Zorka just disappears. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris for a Czech medical supply company, hasn’t seen her in a decade. As Jana and Zorka’s stories slowly circle across the surreal fluctuations of the past and present, the streets of 1980s Prague, the suburbs of 1990s Wisconsin and the lesbian bars of present-day Paris, they lead inexorably to a mysterious door on the Rue de Prague …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the first ten years of her life, Jana was a simple Czech girl, her days run with grey precision by the Czechoslovakian State Security. Then the raven-haired girl Zorka appeared. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris for a Czech medical supply company, hasn’t seen Zorka in a decade. Aim\u00c3\u00a9e is in Paris too, living under the shadow of a menacing blue cloud, mourning the death of her wife Dominique. Meanwhile, in the ether of a lesbian Internet chatroom, a teenager from the American Midwest who goes by the moniker 0 hotgirlAmy 0 plans to rescue Dominxxika N39, a rural Czech housewife, from her tyrannical husband, a hospital bed salesmen. As Aim\u00c3\u00a9e and Jana’s stories slowly circle through the surreal fluctuations of the past and present, they lead inexorably together, to a mysterious bar on Paris’s Rue de Prague.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[68],"product_tag":[127],"class_list":["post-100809","product","type-product","status-publish","product_cat-general-fiction","product_tag-modern-contemporary-fiction-post-c-1945","pa_book_author-moskovich-yelena","pa_cover-paperback","pa_dewey-823-92-edition23","pa_edition-1st-paperback-ed","pa_imprint-serpents-tail","pa_language-english","pa_pages-9065","pa_publisher-serpents-tail","pa_readership-general-trade-code-k","first","onbackorder","taxable","shipping-taxable","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"yoast_head":"\n