The story is a monologue of a woman recapitulating her life. The banality and greyness of her childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and 1980s is interspersed with the hidden family dramas with which the narrator is confronted – her grandfather who was murdered by the communists, her grandmother’s open hatred of the regime, her mother’s emerging mental illness, and her father who is experiencing his coming out during the normalisation period. The narrator recounts all this with a cynical detachment that dissolves when she confesses her love for a certain celebrity. Suddenly, she too is swept away by passionate emotion, the more it swallows her up, the more hopeless it seems. It all leads to an unexpected outcome. The novella Dead Man is no less remarkable for its evocative and colourful narrative style, as well as for its sovereign dialogue.

“‘Dead Man’ by Bianca Bellová skillfully plays with the protagonist’s entire palette of emotional outbursts, which, always shifting between expressive cheerfulness and bottomless pain of the soul, turns the reader into a witness to deep emotional despair.”

— InKulturA-online

“The author has managed to combine the intercepted stories into a whole that is compact and believable. She has a knack for writing in a lively and entertaining way, and the occasional harsher expressions do not disturb the plot, but rather complement and lighten the text. She is definitely one of the better writers in contemporary Czech literature.”

— Vaše literatura

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