Obsazeno - 2. vydání – Nosková Věra (2011)

A loose continuation of the successful novel We Take What Is, it transports the adult heroine Pavla from a small town in the 1950s and 1960s to Prague, which, like all of Czechoslovakia, is 'temporarily' occupied by occupying soldiers - and in a metaphorical sense, also by normalization pragmatists. The period of relative regime and cultural relaxation is replaced by an era of character-breaking. Since Pavla befriends poets, musicians, and artists, the author takes us through this book into the bohemian Prague, but also into a city of obscure sublets, waiters, waitresses, and cheap prostitutes, a Prague whose once ornate facades are turning gray and beginning to peel. It is about whether, under the given circumstances, she can find a home and freedom in the dreamed-of metropolis, as she has always wished. Věra Nosková, in the second part of the trilogy Occupied, following the gripping novel We Take What Is, returns to the years that profoundly changed the lives of many decent people. Just like in the previous book, she describes the reality of a time marked by ubiquitous marasmus, against which the need for youth to live fully, freely, and with love struggles. (The third part, We Know Our Stuff, set in the borderlands, completes the trilogy.)