Breakthrough novel in Central Europe, winner of the Magnesia Litera for prose, the highest recognition in Czech literature.
At 3:37 in the morning, a phone call wakes the protagonist. It’s his mother, whose voice stirs a current of deeply buried memories that lead him back to his childhood and adolescence in Prerov, a small industrial Czech town. There, in a conservative environment where difference was punished, he grew up as a young homosexual in a family without resources.
Gradually, the narrator unravels his memory as if leafing through an old photo album, searching for those small details that often reveal more than meets the eye. Throughout the pages of the novel, he talks about his mother, his father, and his grandfather; about bullying, alcoholism, and how to face a sexual orientation that deviates from the norm. From his personal experience, he pieces together the scattered fragments of his family’s collective history; their secrets and silences.
With a sensitivity comparable to writers like Édouard Louis and Ocean Vuong, Marek Torcík tackles universal themes ―identity, trauma, belonging― from a brave, honest, and healing perspective. His first novel, Desplegarás la memoria, won the Magnesia Litera in 2024 in the prose category, the most prestigious award in Czech literature. That same year, Torcík was also honored with the Jirí Orten Award, which recognizes the most promising authors under thirty.
“A testimony about the difficulty of finding one’s own place in a world that rejects, hurts, and exploits the individual […]. It inspires courage to let go of the past and, above all, is a call for empathy, tolerance, and dialogue as foundations to build a more inclusive society” (CT art)
“Torcík manages to immerse us fully in the action, right where it hurts the most. We accompany a queer boy in the 2000s, in a poor fatherless family, with a mother who works shifts in a factory and an alcoholic grandfather. A very harsh situation, but told not to provoke pity, but because it is completely believable and deeply human” (Martinus.cz)
