Prague

Prague

Prague depicts an intentionally Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who come to Budapest in the early 1990's to seek their fortune- financial, romantic, and spiritual- in an exotic city nearly opened to the West.

They harbour the vague suspicion that their counterparts in Prague, where the atmospheric decay of post-Cold War Europe is even more cinematically perfect, have it better. Still, they hope to find adventure, inspiration, a gold rush, or history in the making. What they actually find is a deceptively beautiful place that they often fail to understand.

What does it mean to fret about your fledgling career when the man across the table was tortured by two different regimes?
How does your short, uneventful life compare to the lives of those who actually resisted, fought and died?
What does your angst mean in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion?
Journalist John Price finds these questions impossible to answer yet impossible to avoid, though he tries to forget them in the din of Budapest's nightclubs, in a romance with a secretive young diplomat, at the table of an elderly cocktail pianist, and in the moody company of a young man obsessed with nostalgia. Arriving in Budapest one spring day to pursue his elusive brother, John finds himself pursuing something else entirely, something he can't quite put a name to, something that will draw him into stories much larger than himself.

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis in 1969 and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five time Jeopardy! Champion. His novels The Egyptologist and Angelica were both bestsellers and have been translated in 25 languages. His most recent book is The Song Is You. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.

Prague
Scribe
Author: Arthur Phillips
ISBN: 9781921640544
Price: $29.95