House of the Deaf Man, The

Peter Krištúfek was born in 1973 and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia. He has an MA in Film and Television Directing from the Academy of Performing Arts, Bratislava, and is an award-winning director. His writing has appeared in numerous Slovak and foreign anthologies, including the annual anthology, Best European Fiction 2010, and many Slovak newspapers and magazines. Peter is publishing The Atlas of Forgetting, a large collection of documents he accumulated while writing his third novel, The House of the Deaf Man.

Alfonz Trnovský, a genial and respected general practitioner in Brežany, a small (fictitious) town in western Slovakia, spent his whole life pretending to be radiantly happy and contented, while the reality was quite different. He turned a deaf ear to his conscience as the 20th century hurtled by: four political regimes, the Holocaust, the political trials of the 1950s, the secret police before and after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia... and the women he loved. But whose are the bones his son accidentally stumbles on buried in the garden? As he sets out to unravel this mystery, the son discovers other skeletons in his father’s cupboard. His quest includes a detour to the Prado in Madrid, where the father’s favourite Goya paintings, the Black Series, are now exhibited after being removed from the walls of its original location, known as the Casa del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man).‘[Peter Krištúfek] offers readers a privileged vantage point from which to watch a nation write … its history,’ New Welsh Review