The novel is subtitled "The Mashins and the Greatest Story of the Cold War", but there are more than one great story in it - it is the saga of one extraordinary family that went through both world wars and the two murderous totalitarian regimes that Central Europe experienced in the 1920s. It is a sensitive, subtly drawn portrait of several extraordinary characters (from Mašín's father, a legionary, soldier, one of the Protectorate's "Three Kings", to his wife Zdena, his mother-in-law Emma and his daughter Nenda, to his sons, Josef and Ctirad Mašín and their friends and associates); it's a gripping, suspenseful western in which five young men with pistols confront the armed to the teeth 20,000-strong army of the East German Volkspolizei, and three of them manage to shoot their way into free West Berlin; it's an elegantly constructed work of art that skillfully employs multiple narrative perspectives and opposing points of view without slipping into moral relativism.
The novel won the 2005 Magnesia Litera Award for Best Book of the Year.
Czech edition