A desert in Bohemia - Jill Paton Walsh

Alegoria do dziś i wczoraj ze wspaniałym morałem... ''A Desert in Bohemia'' is set primarily in a fictional central European country, and it spans the decades between the end of World War II and the fall of Communism in the late 1980`s. We follow the inhabitants of a small town as they cope first with the descending Iron Curtain and then, much later, anticipate Communism`s fall. Paton Walsh, who was a finalist for the Booker Prize for her novel ''Knowledge of Angels,'' writes with grace and cunning, trapping her characters, chapter by chapter, in a web of intrigue. The book opens in 1945 when a frightened and bloodstained young woman emerges from the forest and seeks refuge in what she thinks is an abandoned castle what she has actually stumbled upon is the ancestral home of the aristocratic Blansky family...