Set on the shores of Lost Lake, in upstate New York, these twelve tales tell of three generations of the small Czech community who have made their homes there, beside the water’s edge. Both land and lake feature large in their lives – shaping events, individuals, relationships: in the dead of night, a woman unhitches a boat and rows across the darkness to meet her lover; a young soldier sees hope for the future reflected in the water’s rippled surface; a boy recalls a catch of fish and learns to question the past as later presented. Characters emerge and re-emerge, time moves on, yet through it all the lake remains central, significant, symbolic.

Haunting, poetic and elegiac, Slouka’s stories are about people who inhabit the margins of space and place, about home, history and humanity, about myth and memory.