Happy times

A grand literary dream lined with highs and lows

Barbora’s life revolves around the book fair. It is a place where time is compressed and life pulses with perhaps too much intensity. A crossroads in the literary world where the destinies of several generations intersect. Here, lives collide, drift apart, and sometimes find each other again. What you do not seize in the right moment is lost forever. While Barbora creates a space for others to meet, her own life is marked by loss, heartbreaks, and family dramas. This novel takes us from normalization-era Czechoslovakia through the hopeful 1990s into the present day, from Brno through Vienna all the way to Finnish Lapland.

Markéta Hejkalová has written her most personal novel yet. Šťastná doba is a confident, emotional narrative that pieces together a mosaic of destinies with extraordinary ease, creating a picture in which we can all recognise ourselves.

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With remarkable precision, the author balances the vibrant world of book fairs with the intimate zone of generational pain and trauma, creating an exceptionally vivid portrait of a powerful female experience.
— editors of Host

I wrote this book for the Novel for Frankfurt competition. At first, like a conceited author, I turned my nose up at it a bit, but how could I resist? The fair has accompanied me my whole life, just like the main character Barbora. At times, it threatens to consume her entirely, but at others, when her life is falling apart, the fair is the very thing that saves her.
— Markéta Hejkalová, author