The Visible World

The Visible World is an immensely moving, powerfully romantic novel about the vagaries of love and the legacy of war. The narrator, an American-born son of Czech immigrants, grows up in a boisterous community of the displaced. His New York childhood is suffused with fragments of European history, Czech fairy tales, and family secrets gleaned from overheard conversations. Central in his young imagination is the heroic story of the seven Czech parachutists who assassinated a high-ranking Nazi.As an adult, he travels to Prague, hoping to piece together the essential story that has always evaded him: his mother's. He suspects she had a great wartime love, the loss of which bred a sadness that slowly engulfed her. Though proof is elusive, he imagines the tragic course of the affair and gradually comes to understand his parents' marriage and his own history. A masterful storyteller whom Colum McCann has compared to W. G. Sebald, Louise Erdrich, and Michael Ondaatje, Slouka offers a literary page-turner and a greatly satisfying novel.**A Top-ten Book Sense Pick and a Border's Original Voices Selection

Mark Slouka is the child of Czech immigrants himself, and draws on his personal experience and the inevitable intrusions of the past on the present. He is the author of the novel God’s Fool, named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the short story collection Lost Lake, a New York Times Notable Book in 1998, and the nonfiction work War of the Worlds. Three of his essays have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays, and his short story “The Woodcarvers Tale” won the National Magazine Award for fiction. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, and is currently the director for the writing program at the University of Chicago.