ISBN 978-0-9928242-0-4
Published by Peer Press.
Prague is the city which doesn’t let go. And Ochre doesn’t want to go – that is, he doesn’t think he does. In his forties, he still lives the life of an art student, meeting old dissident friends at the Café Havarie to reminisce about painting under socialism. But one day, something strange happens. As the contours of Ochre’s reality blur into the odd pattern on his wallpaper, he begins to piece together the truth about his long-lost friend Tomáš.
Meanwhile, growing up in a Moravian village, Zuzana Černá doesn’t want to know anything about the past. Her father has been out of work since 1989, but she doesn’t believe the rumours about his old career. She runs wild with her best friend Alena and turns her bedroom into a chaotic art gallery, until she sets off to study art in Munich. Painting connects the main characters of the novel, but it takes the narrative skills of Ochre’s ill-humoured pocket knife to combine their different worlds into one vibrant crescendo.
Featuring original cover artwork and illustrations by Jitka Palmer.
List of publications
2020 ‘Deutsch lernen musst du so oder so oder so oder so’, in BELLA triste 57 (story)
2020 ‘The shoe which knew it was a loaf of bread’, in The Conium Review 9 (story)
2020 ‘Raymond’s Rivers’, online in BMP Voices (poem)
2019 Tiny Stories, Collection of flash fiction, with Czech art publisher Bylo nebylo
2019 ‘Suchen und Ersetzen’, in BELLA triste 54 (story)
2019 ‘The Lost Letter’, in Amanda Saint (ed.), Future Shock (story)
2019 ‘I drop in’, in Washington Square Review 43 (poem)
2018 ‘Restaurant Czechoslovakian’, in A2 2018/14 (novel extract published in Czech, translated by Sára Vybíralová)
2018 ‘Ovenproof ’, in Mingled Voices: International Proverse Poetry Prize Anthology 2018
2018 ‘Good News for People Who Love Fake News’, in The Poeming Pigeon 4.1 (poem)
2017 ‘Corrections’ and ‘Ought’, in The Spectacle 4 (poems)
2017 ‘Self Image’, in Helen: a literary magazine 7 (flash fiction)
2017 ‘Still’, on highlifehighland.com (poem)
2014 Tendrils (Cambridge: Peer Press, 2014) (novel)
2014 ‘Tiny Stories’, in The Catweazle Magazine, autumn 2014 (flash fiction)
2013 ‘The Flowering’, in The Catweazle Magazine, winter 2013 (story)
2013 ‘My father’s favourite question at tea: “Would you like a forklift truck for that?”’, in The Catweazle Magazine, spring 2013 (story)
2009 ‘Seeing her’, in Ash, June 2009 (poem)
2008 ‘Going Down’, in Isis, June 2008 (story)
Lucy Duggan 