Sestra

(City Sister Silver)

About the book
Original title Sestra
First published 1994
Publisher Atlantis, Brno
Pages 487
ISBN number 80-7108-086-1
Languages Czech; German; English; Polish; Hungarian
Award The Egon Hostovský Prize for best book of the year


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Rights sold to
Germany Volk und Welt - Berlin
Hungary Kalligram - Budapest
United States Catbird Press- North Haven
Poland WAB Publishers - Warsaw


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Short characterization

 Always surprising and fast-paced, City, Sister, Silver is at once satirical and romantic, wild and controlled. The novel is full of storytelling, myths, dreams and nightmares, shifting through a variety of genres. It is a novel for readers who want an unforgettable reading experience.

What makes City Sister Silver so special is its language, its energy, and its ability to creatively capture the feelings that accompanied the opening up of Central and Eastern Europe in the 90s, when in Topol's words "time exploded". It is a truly breathtaking book. There is, however, a protagonist, Potok, and a love interest, whom he calls Sister. In short, this is not a realistic approach to an important historical watershed, but rather a unique, imaginative approach. As one Czech critic wrote, "City Sister Silver tells me more about the epoch than many of the books that try so hard to articulate and explain the burning ideas of the day."

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What the press says

 New York Times Book Review, Neil Bermel
Readers embarking on City Sister Silver are in for an exhilarating, exasperating journey ... kaleidoscopic and ethereal, full of motion for its own sake, with many memorable stops along the route.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, Patricia Hampl
Topol's book is a fervent effort by a post-Cold War writer to break away from the familiar dissident mode of his seniors and to stake out the fresh troubles that freedom--and, more to the point, a raw market economy have spawned since the Velvet Revolution.

Choice
Topol's phantasmagoric odyssey through a racketeering, polyglot, cultural stew of post-Soviet Bohemia has been acclaimed as the definitive novel of a Czech new wave. Catbird Press does great service to bring it to anglophone readers.

Newsday, John Leonard
City Sister Silver is a first novel the way The Tin Drum and Midnight's Children were first novels… a prodigal astonishment; an emancipation proclamation.

Talk Magazine
A masterpiece of post-communist Czech fiction.

San Francisco Bay Guardian, Randall Lyman
Topol is already being hailed as the supernova of post-1989 Czech fiction.

Mladá fronta dnes, Jiří Peňás
City Sister Silver marks a turning point in Czech prose, the point when literary development must finally break away and, after all that fatiguing twists and turns and subtle departures, strike out in a definite direction… the novel incorporates the tremendous hum of life and raw materials that has piled up with time, and does so with verve and with bold artistic sylization… Topol's novel is a cross between a picaresque novel about the wanderings of Potok, the hounded narrator, and a breakneck-paced thriller complete with agents, spies, dead bodies and Mafiosi.

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Excerpt

City Sister Silver

Not available yet

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