Book tips for Christmas 2024: The best books under the tree

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What to buy under the tree this year? The first batch of tips from the cultural section of Seznam Zpráv brings book tips for lovers of good fiction.

Dorota Ambrožová wrote one of the best debuts this year about the fact that adolescence is not honey. With humor and empathy, Iva Hadj Moussa set out to explore the most fragile and mysterious thing the world knows today: the souls of aging men. In the tips for Christmas book gifts, you will also find the apocalyptic novel Maniac by Benjamín Labatut, the completion of Karin Lednické’s magnificent trilogy The Leaning Church, for which the author won the Medal of Merit a few weeks ago, or the magical novel by the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov about a place where time literally stops .

The debut of the thirty-year-old Ambrožová is one of the most interesting that appeared in Czech literature this year. However, this does not mean that it will be a completely pleasant read. If you want to please someone with a break, avoid Last Summer – despite the name, it is not a pleasant romance from a nice hotel in Vysočina. The main character Hanka (you learn her name only at the very end of the novel) is a “p**a” for some of her classmates, who has a “three-dimensional ego”, but she is much more frightened when she finds out that the teacher considers her a smart and talented student .

The easiest way to describe Last Summer is as a coming-of-age novel. And given Ambrožová’s age, it could be inferred that the book is about coming of age somewhere on the border between millennials and generation Z. However, Last Summer is more refined -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Through literary references, it also refers to older generations, thus reminding readers , that absolutely everyone was unbearable when they were growing up – from boomers to alphas. At first glance, it might seem that this exceptional literary debut, continuing the legacy of JD Salinger, is a manifesto of generational liberation. Perhaps Dorota Ambrožová’s book is more of a literary exercise in the ability to accept oneself. Extremely fun exercise, by the way.

Who is more fragile than teenage girls? After all, aging men. Iva Hadj Moussa dedicated her fourth prose in a row to them and thus definitively established herself as a writer who perfectly combines a sense of empathy, exaggeration and love for crushing metal. It is he who plays the main role in the novel Heavy Souls. If you don’t count the aging narrator Johanes, a guy who is approaching fifty, he is divorced, lonely and increasingly bitter. The only thing that filled him with happiness in life was to untie the guitar and indulge in gloomy metal music together with his four (similarly lost) friends.

Hadj Moussa gives the outsider a second chance and lets him taste the joy of playing again in the story. Maybe it will be the music that will bring joy back to Johanes despite adversity, prejudices, but also his own life’s hiccups. Heavy souls are exactly the kind of reading that relieves a person. And not because it was a respite. Rather, because he can find hope -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ even if it should be in the darkest music on the planet.

A detective story should probably not be missing from any proper list of Christmas book recommendations. What Jozef Karika offers is a detective story for the second time. A social thriller in which top politicians appear among the suspects and the victim is the entire state.

Karika became famous in the Czech Republic mainly as an author of horror films. But he can also write in other genres – after all, his first success was with the political thriller In the Shadow of the Mafia. It grew into a trilogy in which Karika mapped the dark underbelly of political unrest in Slovakia. Another trilogy with the subtitle Black Circle is now being published in the Czech Republic, in which Karika returns to the topic. “When I wrote it, I believed that I was creating an epilogue of what is happening in Slovakia. It turned out that it was more of a prologue to what is to come,” said the Slovak writer in an interview for Seznam Zprávy.

Two parts of the Black Circle are currently available in Czech translation. When reading it, you will probably be embarrassed – on the one hand, it will be an exciting experience, on the other, you may be skeptical about the political and social atmosphere of our closest neighbors.

This Christmas gift will be more expensive because you will need to buy two books. The last work of the famous American writer Cormac McCarthy, which he completed before he died last year, is a novel diptych. The books Passenger and Stella Maris tell the story of two siblings, Billy and Alicia Western, each book follows one of them, and together they connect into a refined whole -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ a story about the fragility and unpredictability of life, or perhaps the entire universe. The books that complete the work of one of the most important American authors of the 20th century can be hopelessly nihilistic, but also extremely funny.

It will sound cynical, but coming across a good novel about the Holocaust in 2024 is not easy. One has to read a thousand times stolen stories about taters or librarians from Auschwitz and other manipulative stories, whose authors have given up on originality and literary expression, or are simply trying to make money on what is in vogue. Even Boučková does not bring the most original plot in the world: houses steeped in grim history are already known, and people who have faced great history have been paraded in literature since time immemorial.

But Boučková is a seasoned, self-confident author, whose style is imprinted even in a more self-banal form and breathes new energy and individuality into it. Her novel turns into a thrilling search, in which you have to face fast passing time, disappearing testimonies and the unreliability of your own memory. Inconspicuous neighbors become essential characters of modern Czech history – in the best case scenario. In the worse their victims. And sometimes both. The house in which the writer herself grew up is followed by a pediatrician, then a prisoner in Auschwitz, a forced collaborator of Mengele and a painstaking savior of the suffering, or Václav Havel. Boučková cleverly incorporated the immediate present into the book.

The writer’s search for the history of the inhabitants of an ordinary apartment building in Prague is wedged in by the war in Ukraine, last year’s shooting at the philosophy faculty or the attacks on October 7 in Israel. A novel about dark history becomes a literary research: What is it like to witness great history? And do you know when they are happening before your eyes?

Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut invented a special genre for himself. He writes about real characters in a refined, exciting and experimental way, as if he were creating an avant-garde novel. As if he was trying to build something inimitable, to get closer to the scientists he talks about with such enthusiasm.

Labatut’s book Maniac tells the story of the Hungarian scientist John Von Neumann, the man who was at the birth of the atomic bomb, but also of artificial intelligence. It means that he helped create inventions that can lead to the end of the world several times. And he knew it very well. Labatut’s book balances on the edge of genius and destruction -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Whether they are testing atomic bombs or playing go games with artificial intelligence. Maniac is a bit scary, but therefore also a very exciting read.

Jiří Hájíček does not have an easy position. He won perhaps all the literary awards that can be collected in the Czech Republic. Some even more than once. He just refused to accept the State Prize for Literature for 2018. His readers and literary critics praised Hájíček for his careful mapping of the South Bohemian countryside, written so poetically and universally that stories from the local world of small villages traveled throughout the republic. They wrote about the breakdown of relationships, about ecological disasters (caused by man), about abandonment and loneliness. For a while after a stellar period full of awards, it seemed that Hájíček would hang up the writing of melancholic rural novels and would only publish haiku collections.

He eventually returned to prose in a broad arc. In Sailboat on vignettes, he tried interpersonal relationships. Now, with Drake on the dirt road, it’s like the good old Hájíček. Rural unrest is facing big capital here. Big Dragon buys shares of a large estate, which basically means that he pits the residents of a single village against each other. What to pay for, they may have had a damaged relationship forever.

Hájíček may seem repetitive at first glance, but it cannot be said that he is writing about a topic that has been mined for a long time. The Dragon on the Field Road appears to be a very up-to-date book. The writer’s calm, poetic style may give the impression that the new prose is somehow relaxing -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ But it is not. A threat lurks beneath the crust of the quiet rural landscape. And Hájíček takes a bold approach to her.

If Jiří Hájíček is the chronicler of the South Bohemian countryside, Karin Lednická must be the recorder of Karvinsk, the region of miners, their abandoned women and other black souls. Few literary works resonated on the domestic scene as much as her Leaning Church trilogy. It was completed this spring and will probably collect literary awards and be placed in annual polls. Lednické managed, in the words of literary critic Jan M. Heller, to write “an original account of a region that is unique in its historical identity and is currently, partly on the ruins of demolished cities, struggling to find a new one.”

Leaning Church hit the reader’s need to explore their own past -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and especially in places that usually remain a side of interest. Karin Lednické’s extraordinary work was also appreciated this year by President Petr Pavel, who awarded the writer the Medal of Merit for her careful examination of forgotten history.

The Czech Republic does not look like a place for horror movies. It’s more reminiscent of The Hobbit, a land of gentle hills and somewhat unfriendly inhabitants with a love for food, beer and their own quiet place. Nevertheless, there are authors who, in a sweetly sleepy landscape, where pines rustle across the meadows, can find carefully hidden rages. The last time the writer Petra Klabouchová did it was in the horror novel Ignis Fatuus. The focus of fear is in Šumava. The scientific expedition here in the times of deep normalization is to investigate the origin of mysterious phenomena.

This is how columnist Jarmila Křenková praised Klabouchová’s novel in her review: “The novel is most engaging and terrifying in the passages that are devoted to seemingly everyday life in a region where the border between institutions is clearly defined by barbed wire, but that between the world of the living and the dead dissolves into the omnipresent fog. In the descriptions of dilapidated estates and dead orchards, ancient grievances float inexorably, and even banal sensations such as the smell of cinnamon and freshly baked strudel here have horror connotations.​​”

Fresh strudel and a scary book: the perfect combination.

Translation: David Bernstein

One more mysterious place in book tips: one where you can overcome the flow of time. Bulgarian poet and writer Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Časokryt tells of a world in which nostalgia has won over reason. Everyone is drowning in memories of the past, when they emerge, they immediately wither away. It does not concern people, but entire nations. The only way we can “Make Europe Great Again” is to go back to the good old days. What’s the point that each country sees them differently.

Gospodinov’s novel is a beautifully poetic dystopia, the poet’s opus magnum, which earned him the prestigious International Booker Prize for 2023. With his psychoanalysis of European nostalgia, Gospodinov could also interest Czech readers.