V císařských barvách aneb jak budoucí hrdina Habsburské říše Otto Prohaska málem odvrátil 1. světovou válku – Biggins John (2017)

With his first novel A Sailor of Austria, John Biggins established himself in the pantheon of top-tier authors of maritime adventure literature alongside S. C. Forester and Patrick O'Brian. His second novel, In Imperial Colors, about the adventures of a naval lieutenant of Czech descent, Otto Prohaska, also received rave reviews as a work that adds the sensitivity of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 or Robert Altman's film M*A*S*H to traditional maritime adventures. The theme of this thrilling novel, which chronologically precedes the stories in A Sailor of Austria and is therefore published first, is a chain of adventurous incidents involving Lieutenant Ottokar Prohaska, starting in 1914. Otto leaves his crew without permission for two weeks due to thoughtless flirtations with a Polish actress, experiencing colorful and even bizarre adventures both on land and at sea, not only in Europe but also beyond, and returns after many months with a wild story about Serbian terrorists and their plan to assassinate the archduke in a place called Sarajevo. Europe helplessly slides into war, and Otto along with it, documenting the twilight of this old-fashioned, bureaucracy-obsessed empire that once attempted to unify Central Europe. The author turns the given literary genre on its head, and each...