No Saints or Angels

Ivan Klima has long been cited among such masters as Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, and on the publication of Lovers for a Day, The Boston Globe praised him as "a writer at the top of his form." Now Klima takes us again into the heart of contemporary Prague, in a story where the Communist People's Militia marches headlong into the drug culture of the present. Kristyna is in her forties, the divorced mother of a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, Jana. She is beginning to love a man fifteen years her junior, but her joy is clouded by worry -- Jana has been cutting school, and perhaps using heroin. Meanwhile, Kristyna's mother has forced on her a huge box of personal papers left by Kristyna's dead father, a tyrant whose Stalinist ideals she despised. A remarkable portrayal of a woman striving to be a lover and a mother, unravel her father's secret past, and protect her daughter in the nihilist present, No Saints or Angels confirms once again Ivan Klima's place among the most accomplished writers in world literature.


Genre: Literary Fiction