Les v dom Morntajnov Alena (2023)

This unexpectedly chilling novel by Alena Morntajnov, author of Hana, The Silent Years and November Fall, follows a girl whom everyone calls the brat and who seems to have come into the world by mistake, as if she were simply extra. Her father disappears during a flood, while her mother escapes responsibility through lovers and alcohol, leaving the girl in the care of a hostile grandmother who runs a garden centre and believes that everything bad in life can be eradicated like voracious slugsor simply left unmentioned. Yet a forest surrounds them, hiding something terrifying, and one day the girl begins to speak. Alena Morntajnov tells a powerful, dramatic story about how nothing in life is quite as it first appears, and how no secret is ever buried so deeply that it cannot be unearthed. You will be afraid, but you will not stop reading until it comes to the surface. The contents are in Czech.