The Lake

A dystopian page-turner about the coming of age of a young hero, which won the 2017 EU Prize for Literature. A fishing village at the end of the world. A lake that is drying up and, ominously, pushing out its banks. The men have vodka, the women troubles, the children eczema to scratch at. Born into this unforgiving environment, Nami, a young boy, embarks on a journey with nothing but a bundle of nerves, a coat that was once his grandfather’s, and the vague idea of searching for his mother, who disappeared from his life at a young age. To uncover the greatest mystery of his life, he must sail across and walk around the lake, and finally dive to its bottom. The Lake is a raw account of life in a devastated land and the harsh, primitive circumstances under which people fight to survive.

Bianca Bellová was born in Prague and grew-up as the communist regime of Czechoslovakia began to fracture. This background provided the material for her first book, Sentimental Novel. She has since written four further novels and worked as both a translator and interpreter.
The Lake won the Czech national Magnesia Litera Book of the Year Award and European Prize for Literature. It has been translated into over twenty languages.

Alex Zucker has translated novels by the Czech authors Bianca Bellová, Petra Hůlová, Jáchym Topol, J. R. Pick, Magdaléna Platzová, Tomáš Zmeškal, Josef Jedlička, Heda Margolius Kovály, Patrik Ouředník, and Miloslava Holubová. He has also Englished stories, plays, subtitles, young adult and children’s books, song lyrics, reportages, essays, poems, philosophy, art history, and an opera. His translation of Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms and Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop received Writing in Translation awards from English PEN, and in 2010 he won the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association for his translation of Petra Hůlová’s debut novel, All This Belongs to Me. Alex is a past cochair of the Translation Committee at PEN America, and his collaboration with the Authors Guild has thus far resulted in the first national survey of working conditions for literary translators in the U.S., the creation of a Translators Group within the Guild, and the Guild’s first model contract for literary translation. More at alexjzucker.com.