A young boy grows up in Terezin (Theresienstadt) – an infamous fortress town with a sinister past, Together with his friends he plays happily amidst the walls of this former Nazi prison, scouting the tunnels for fragments of history under the careful eye of one of its survivors, Uncle Lebo, until one day there is an accident, and he is forced to leave.

Returning to Terezin many years later, he joins Lebo’s campaign to preserve the town, and the pair quickly attract donations from wealthy benefactors, a steady stream of tourists buying souvenir t-shirts and a cult-like following of young travelers, among them the beautiful, red-headed Maruška. But before long the authorities impose a brutal crack-down, chaos ensues, and the narrator finds himself fleeing to Belarus in pursuit of Maruška, where fresh horrors of the Nazi and communist killing fiends drive him ever closer to the evils he had hoped to escape.

Bold, brilliant and blackly comic,The Devil’s Workshop paints a deeply troubling portrait of two countries dealing with their ghosts and asks: at what point do we consign the past to history?

The Devil’s Workshop received the PEN Award for Writing in Translation 2013, was shortlisted for the Dutch European Literature Prize 2011 and the Polish Angelus prize 2014, and was on the longlist for the Dublin Literary Award 2015.

“The Devil’s Workshop is a miracle of compression, its scope greater than ought to be possible for a book of its length. It should help to cement Jáchym Topol’s reputation as one of the most original and compelling European voices at work today.”

— The Times Literary Supplement

“The Irresistible Heart of Darkness: Jáchym Topol and the Devil to Pay. The text is simultaneously callous and mournful, and one of Topol’s best pieces”

— The Quarterly Conversation

“Blending fact and fiction, Topol’s darkly comic novel, lucidly translated by Alex Zucker, is a hard-hitting exploration of two nations bedevilled by past horrors.”

— The Independent

Translations