Far from the Tree could not officially appear in communist Czechoslovakia, it was published as an underground so-called samizdat edition in 1984. Later, in 1987 it was published by the exil publisher Index in Cologne. Brabcová was the first laureate to receive the Jiří Orten Prize for this book.

Finally, the heavens show some understanding. It opens the floodgates and lets the rain flow. The Flood is here, the cleansing, all-devouring water that sinks Bohemia – in an ocean like the one that last covered the land in the Palaeozoic era. The Flood, the end of mankind, the end of the world, the end of civilisation.

For Věra, the first-person narrator and protagonist in Zuzana Brabcová’s novel “Far from the Tree”, this comes as no surprise. She has always known that this end is imminent, that her vision of the apocalyptic masses of water that will wash everything away was more than just the “Dada dream” of a mentally disturbed person. And now the time has come. The water has arrived. Faced with the rising tide, “with the water’s edge at her throat”, she closes her eyes and begins to write a long-planned novel: Memories of a Life in Bohemia in the Second Half of the 20th Century.

Zuzana Brabcová, born in Prague in 1959 and almost exactly the same age as her prophetess Věra, has written the novel of her generation, a message in a bottle from the time of darkness called “normalisation” – and at the same time a bitter general reckoning with the world on the eve of the apocalypse. “Far from the Tree”, this revelation by Věra T., has become a showpiece of Czech literature.

“Our generation”, writes Zuzana Brabcová alias Věra, is “autistic, addicted to alcohol, deeply in debt, melancholic in the East, lacking in ambition, objective and dynamic in the West”. It is a generation without hope and without prospects, imprisoned in an “airtight homeland with a replica of a sky”, in a country that has built itself a questionable legitimacy out of silence, lies and crooked legends. A generation “without an anchor, because without a sea”, whose only option is to settle down in the cemetery of disappointed hopes or to leave the country. Nothing new in Bohemia.

— Die Zeit

“The language of this novel is extraordinarily poetic. It beautifully incorporates the language of the Bible. But beyond this wildly clever and complex book, you feel very small as a reader.”

— Trouw

“The poetics in the book are indispensable to describe the hopelessness of real-life socialism.”

— NRC

“The book stands brightly next to the other inside views of actually existing socialism that we know from Czechoslovakia. While Hrabal and Kundera, Kliment and Klíma were witnesses to developments in their homeland (albeit powerless ones), Zuzana Brabcová belongs to a different generation: the generation of those born after, who were too young to consciously experience the dawn of the Prague Spring and its abrupt end.”

— Die Zeit

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