Available Formats
How I Came to Know Fish
By (Author) Ota Pavel
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
15th July 2025
17th April 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
891.8635
Paperback
144
Width 109mm, Height 180mm, Spine 8mm
91g
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Of all the sleep a man can have, the fisherman's sleep is the sweetest. It is the greatest of luxuries - sleep and fishing.' Through tender, vivid, and often humorous recollections - from magical fishing trips to the rivers and ponds of Bustehrad to his charismatic father's eccentric business ventures - this bittersweet memoir tells the story of a childhood in Czechoslovakia, against the backdrop of World War II.
Ota Pavel (1930-1973) worked for much of his short life as a journalist and sports reporter. Despite serious bouts of mental illness he wrote brilliant, lyrical accounts, some collected in How I Came to Know Fish, of his childhood and his family in a Czechoslovakia under overwhelming threat from Nazism.