by Jenni Fagan
First published 2016
A Scottish poet arrives in Prague with nothing but a notebook and raw nerves. Her mission: track the spectral traces of a long-dead queen through the city's labyrinthine streets and underground histories. As she delves deeper into forgotten archives and marginal narratives, she uncovers a web of historical silences and personal obsessions that threaten to consume her own fragile identity. Each fragment she discovers blurs the line between investigation and possession, between historical recovery and personal haunting. Her research becomes a dangerous excavation of memory, where the boundaries between researcher and subject dissolve into a charged, electric uncertainty.
Genres: historical-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: haunting, obsession, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Bohemia, Prague
Period: Contemporary
188 pages · Paperback · Polygon An Imprint of Birlinn Limited