Děti Václava Havla (2026)

Did Václav Havel have a son? Daniel, a middle-aged doctor, returns to his native Trutnov and discovers that the past cannot be avoided or neutralized, only opened up again. The town where the Stalino cinema once stood, and whose façade now bears a statue of Václav Havel, becomes a setting for conflict between ideologies, memory and forgetting. The story reaches from Nazi crimes in the subcamps of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in the Trutnov region and the Holocaust in what is now Ukraine, through communist normalization, to today’s hollowed-out freedom. Before Daniel, it unfolds as a series of decisions that were never truly settled. Marek Přibil’s fifth novel connects personal lives with European history, public space and political myths. Alongside a powerful plot linked to the fate of Daniel’s grandparents, the story also introduces Václav Havel as a character stripped of public clichés and ceremonial gestures. This Czech-language existential and socially critical novel portrays a Europe living on unacknowledged compromises, a memory pretending to be resolved and a language capable of precisely naming what is usually left unsaid.