Innocence

A REDISCOVERED GEM OF CZECH LITERATURE BY THE AUTHOR OF UNDER A CRUEL STAR

Now available in paperback, a crime novel set in the stifling atmosphere of political oppression in the early days of Socialist Czechoslovakia.

In 1985, Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator and political exile Heda Margolius Kovály turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by the stories of Raymond Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague: her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution and her own persecution at his disgrace, into a smart and evocative psychological thriller-cum-detective novel.

Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, INNOCENCE follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself in difficult circumstances. As the novel brings this group alive, it tells their various life stories that have brought them to this job, the secrets they share with one another, and the secrets they keep. When the detective trying to solve the first murder is found slain by the cinema, all of their secrets come into the light.