Product details
- ISBN 9781803096728
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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An intimate story of otherness and care by a major voice in Slovak literature.
For more than three decades, Jana Bodnárová has been one of Slovak literature’s most distinctive voices, writing with a lyricism that is at once tender and unflinchingly harsh. Patchwork in White is a brief yet powerful novel that stitches together fragments of lives bound by intimacy, difference, and care, set against the social fabric of Czechoslovakia from the mid-1950s to the present.
At the center of the novel are Ota and Andrej, a couple whose shared memories unfold through shards of childhood, marriage, and parenthood. Their lives are irrevocably shaped by the decision to adopt albino twins—children marked by abuse and exclusion because of their otherness. As these fragments accumulate, the novel becomes a meditation on motherhood, femininity, love, and the quiet imminence of death.
Poetic, restrained, and brutally honest, Bodnárová’s prose finds resonance in what is left unsaid. Illustrations by Eva Moflárová deepen the book’s emotional texture, creating a work of rare intimacy and moral force.
Jana Bodnárová was born in former Czechoslovakia. In addition to publishing books of prose, poetry, works for children, radio plays, and screenplays for television, she has also created and presented video performances both in domestic galleries and on experimental theatre stages abroad. Isabel Stainsby is a literary and commercial translator from Czech, Slovak, German, and occasionally French into English. She studied languages and linguistics at the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol. She has translated twelve books so far, ranging from science fiction to memoir to academic monograph, plus several chapters, short stories, and articles. Patchwork in White is her second translation, following Barbora Hrínová’s Unicorns.
