Miroslav Zamboch · 2001 · survival

One of the best-known Czech post-apocalyptic novels, and unusual for being set entirely at home. A century of war between humans and beings from the other side of reality has ended the world, and a man with no memory walks through Moravian Silesia - Ostrava, Tesin, the Beskydy - trying to work out what he is.

1. 1
   The Beskydy

   A man wakes in the mountains of Moravian Silesia with no memory, an eye that has an intelligence of its own, and injuries that keep healing when they should not - and no idea whether he is a man, a demon or something the war made.

2. 2
   Jablunkov

   The pass country on the Slovak and Polish borders, where the road south has always run - and where the wandering starts, in a landscape Zamboch keeps recognisably Czech under everything that has been done to it.

3. 3
   Tesin

   Cieszyn Silesia, a region cut in half by a border in 1920 and cut again by whatever ended the world - and a series of episodes rather than a plot, each one a town that has arranged its own survival badly.

4. 4
   Ostrava

   The central chapter and the reason readers remember the book: the mining and steel city, which Zamboch puts through a century of war between humans and things from the other side of reality and leaves standing.