Publisher's Synopsis
When David is offered a job as Assistant Director of Studies in a Prague language school, he does not realise the School's charismatic, but insecure Principal is ignorant of David's appointment and has other plans. And David's difficulties in this faraway land, of which he knew nothing, just ten years after the Velvet Revolution, increase as he tries to come to terms with the people of his new homeland. He meets a comic array of eccentric teachers, with different reasons for being in Prague and realises that they all have alienation in common: searching for an identity away from the land of their birth: the mad Hamish Cabbage, a restlessly dour Gothic Scot, a Czech exile in England from 1968, a Czech lady who has suffered under the old regime, a German studying football violence, the unpredictably angry Christie Cross, and his Foreign Office Czech Student. As he delves deeper into the Czech soul in this land of forgetting, he begins to lay to rest old ghosts from his English past and put down roots. We explore aspects of Czech-ness and the motivating eccentricities of an ex-pat community. In a steep, but exciting learning curve, David has an affair with a young Californian, and a deeper attachment with the mysterious Czech woman with green eyes, who first appears in his dreams of the momentous events of 1968 and 1989 and then begins to teach him Czech. He falls in love, but she has a secret he does not learn until the final pages, as David wrestles with his own identity.This is a novel about self-recognition, whose tragic-comic characters give us some deep insights into human nature in a strange environment, as well as Czech history and beautiful Prague.
