Welcome to the Wild East!

This sentence sums up this book exactly.

The book is set in the Czech countryside, around the Sázava River, where the inhabitants live by their own rules, their own laws. They live a real life, they are simple people, ordinary people, not intellectuals. But there are some well-known figures in the book as well, such as Gerard Depardieu, President Zeman and Cardinal Duka.

You can find all of life and death in this book. God, love, death, murder, the devil, booze, humour. Terror, Ukraine, the Russian threat, money, icons, etc. etc. It’s clear that A Sensitive Person is actually such a varied book that it can’t really be summed up in a few sentences. It is tender and cruel. Poetic and vulgar. Murderous and kissable. Sad and funny. Riveting and savage. Earthy and heavenly. Fast and slow. Touching andhard. One can make up any adjective one want and it fits.

In this brutally funny, carnivalesque novel we accompany Tab, a wandering Czech actor, who tours around Europe on the theater circuit with his partner, Sona, and their two young sons, attending festivals and performing plays. Confronted with growing resentment toward foreigners, Tab decides – after a turbulent interlude in Ukraine where they end up in the middle of the war – to return home to the banks of the Sazava River southeast of Prague. No sooner has he arrived than Tab finds himself falsely accused of a terrible crime and forced to go on the run with his two sons. Over the course of their rambling, dodging authorities by car, foot, and raft, they encounter a motley cast of allies and enemies. Tab’s sudden reappearance and just-as-sudden disappearance ripple through the community, catalyzing a chaotic chain of events that reaches a final, raucous crescendo. Hailed as “a picaresque romp of black humor and fantasy” (Times Literary Supplement), this is an unforgettable novel about finding the sparks of humanity even in the bleakest of places, in which love or the longing to find it lie around every bend.

“As long as the state of Europe inspires such works of art, it is not lost – Jáchym Topol’s novel ‘A Sensitive Person’.”

— Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“‘A Sensitive Person’ is a disturbing novel about contemporary Europe that has also earned Jachym Topol the Czech State Award for Literature. Now he definitely got out of the underground and climbed onto the pedestal where the Czech classics stand.”

— ORF 1

“After the last page, as a reader, you will have to gasp first. Amazed, you will wonder how Topol managed to weave together so many stylistic registers and such a deluge of stories into one. After that, you know what you are going to do. Start again on ‘A Sensitive Person’.”

— Tzum

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