Bøger af Michal Ajvaz

In a small village on the southern coast of Crete, the narrator meets a young man who tells him a history of his journey which took him from Prague as far as to the Libyan sea. It is a voyage to uncover mysterious deaths of two brothers: one was murdered during the ballet performance, the body of the second one was found by Turkish fishermen at the Asia Minor shores. On the move, the amateur detective is accompanied by one of the brothers´ girlfriend. They have to work out a lot of traces, clues and rebuses – seemingly meaningless clusters of letters in the picture of a Hungarian painter, fragments of words created in the sea by bodies of phosphorescing worms, puzzling shapes of jelly sweets found in a small shop in Croatia or the plot of an American sci-fi thriller movie, which the protagonists watch in the cinema in Rome suburb. Such leads send the heroes from town to town, the plot takes part on night trains and many places in Europe - in Bratislava, Budapest, Lublan, on the islands of Mykon and Crete… With the search for the murderer of both the brothers many other stories are interconnected, and they take the readers to even more distant places of the Earth: Moscow, Boston, Mexico City…

"Reading such a world means stepping inside it, letting it infect you, bruise, scrape, poison and obsess you." Jonathan Bolton, CONTEXT

The Golden Age is a fantastical travelogue in which a modern-day Gulliver writes a book about a civilization he once encountered on a tiny island in the Atlantic. The islanders seem at first to do nothing but sit and observe the world, and indeed draw no distinction between reality and representation, so that a mirror image seems as substantial to them as a person (and vice versa); but the center of their culture is revealed to be "e;The Book"e; a handwritten, collective novel filled with feuding royal families, murderous sorcerers, and narrow escapes. Anyone is free to write in "e;The Book,"e; adding their own stories, crossing out others, or even ap- pending "e;footnotes"e; in the form of little paper pouches full of extra text-but of course there are pouches within pouches, so that the story is impossible to read "e;in order,"e; and soon begins to overwhelm the narrator's orderly treatise.

On the outskirts of Prague, a painter stumbles across a mysterious wooden object and notices it's strange shape reproduced in various places around the city. He realizes that it holds the key to uncovering the truth about the disappearance of a young girl. A thrilling fantasy and a philosophical meditation on the search for meaning in modern life.