She’s a nurse, he’s almost a child. They meet on the ruins of their lives, on the ruins of the old world, on the ruins of a hospital, into which the new world is encroaching like the ubiquitous trampling of weedy creepers. It doesn’t get any better than this. But what if it is? Or… what if it’s possible to disappear? Escape from the fire that relentlessly sprinkles the hot earth around, from all those rules about how a woman and a man should behave, from memories, from oneself…

“Bianca Bellová can evoke an atmosphere through sensory perception, to capture the pinkish color of skin on a frosty ride on horseback and the grayish skin afflicted with plague spots. In passages like these the author’s precise style stands out, and the reader naturally perceives the power of words and their skilful use.”

— Hospodářské noviny

“As in ‘The Lake’, Bianca Bellová is not afraid of what many literary critics lack in Czech writers – to “dirt” her book with the modernity, with the problems that plague the world today. The social-critical dimension of the text, directed against the suppression of women’s rights, is evident in ‘Mona’. It is not a one-dimensional novel, for that Bellová is, after all, a too experienced author .”

— iLiteratura

Translations