The Visible World

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

'My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.' As a boy growing up in New York, his parents' memories of their Czech homeland seem to belong to another world, as distant and unreal as the fairy tales his father tells him. It is only as an adult, when he makes his own journey to Prague, that he is finally able to piece together the truth of his parents' past: what they did, who his mother loved, and why they were never able to forget.

Reviews

'This is lush, luminous fiction.' Oprah 'Exquisitely written - Slouka's rapturous intensity more than justifies comparisons with Ondaatje and Berger' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 'Slouka's prose is always exquisite' Time Out "The novel skilfully conveys the irony of wartime love stories, then end with plot twists that wring out pure romance, in the style of Milan Kundera and Michael Ondaatje.' Sunday Telegraph 'Slouka's novel's power lives in the imaginative effort to portray loss that is inherited and endured as an echo...' Richard Ford

Author Bio

MARK SLOUKA's short fiction has featured in Best American Short Stories and has been awarded a National Magazine Award for Fiction. He is a Contributing Editor at Harper's, and the author of The Woodcarver's Tale and God's Fool (Knopf and Picador). He is Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago.