You grow up in a family that you have to get along with. Then you are swept away by adolescence and the insurmountable challenges of first loves, followed by a series of other more or less happy relationships, a lot of so-called “ordinary problems”, until you somehow manage to get to the old age without harm. And during all this you are permanently trying to please your parents, whom you didn’t actually choose. The seasons change and lives go by. Bianca Bellová’s short story collection captures just these fragments of human destiny. They are snippets of individual life stories that often contain these fates in their entirety – a girl at a swimming pool faces a turning point, a meeting arranged via Tinder is similarly pivotal for another woman, a good friend dies, another goes to read at a literary festival, an old poet has a conversation with a young journalist in a nursing home, and in the inhospitable Sudetenland, a prisoner recalls the girl who turned his world around. But from the heaps of nostalgia and melancholy, Bianca Bellová also manages to dig out a dose of strange hope. Hope that all this is really just fragments and the world keeps on turning…

“Bellová can also write evocatively in short-track work, and she knows how to compose an exciting story.”

— Tzum

“The writer is an excellent storyteller who can tap into the essence of humanity. The haunting, almost suggestive quality that is present in most of their prose is also evident in this case.”

— Artikl

“Bianca Bellová builds some of these short stories around more or less absurd trifles. She plants them like seedlings in the middle of a flower bed so that she can thoroughly loosen the soil around them, giving them room to visibly grow.”

— Aktuálně

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