Happy Days

A grand book lover’s dream, laced with ups and downs

Barbora’s life revolves around the exhibition grounds, a place where time is condensed and life pulsates perhaps a little too intensely. Here, lives spanning several generations intersect against a backdrop of literature – colliding, passing one another by, occasionally re-finding another. What isn’t seized in the moment, disappears. Over time, exhibitions accumulate like beads on a string. As Barbora creates a space where others can meet, her own life is marked by loss, thwarted love, and family drama. Having previously taken us from the era of totalitarianism through the hopeful days of the 1990s to the present day, and from Brno via Vienna to Finnish Lapland, Markéta Hejkalová has written her most personal novel yet. Happy Days presents a masterly narrative high on emotion, in which individual destinies fit into a mosaic with apparent ease, forming a picture in which each of us may recognise ourselves.

With remarkable precision, the author has struck a balance between the vibrancy of a book fair and the intimate realm of generational pain and trauma, thereby creating an exceptionally vivid portrait of powerful female experience.

‘A book fair has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember, just as it has been for Barbora, the main character. Sometimes it threatens to swallow her whole. At others, when her life is falling apart, it is the book fair that saves her,’ says the author about her book.