Alice Horáčková
Alice Horáčková (b. 1980) is a graduate of Charles University’s Faculty of Social Sciences. Her debut, Vladimíra Čerepková (Argo, 2014) – a literary biography of a forgotten female Beat poet–was nominated for the Josef Škvorecký Award and the 2014 Magnesia Litera for Discovery of the Year. She followed it up with 7× in a Supporting Role (2016), a collection of interviews with siblings of famous Czechs, and the confessional novel Unopened Letters (2018), inspired by the true story of the widow of a celebrated but deeply troubled artist. Her most recent work is an intimate dual biography, Václav and Kamila Benda: Partners in Life and in Dissent (2025).
A House Divided
June 2022, 576 pages
Rights sold to: Switzerland (Diogenes Verlag)
Available material: English sample, English synopsis, German sample
The story of a family in Sudetenland
In a mountain village in the Sudetenland during the first half of the twentieth century, poachers cross paths with free-spirited women, fabric mill owners mingle with lady Spiritists, and Czechs and Germans share beds in mixed marriages – only to clash over which nationality to declare in the census, who will build the new school first, and who killed a dog named Masaryk.
Amid secret romances, army desertions, casual betrayals, and name changes, small choices end up costing lives. Drawing on the history of her own family – on rosy recollections and blue memoirs, on photographs, yellowing newspapers, and archival discoveries – the author weaves a sweeping family saga.
Shifting between male and female voices, between the fabulous and the documentary, she resurrects the vanished world her relatives once inhabited. Some of her kin were expelled from Czechoslovakia at the war’s end, while others remained. One uncle even befriended Reinhard Heydrich and “Aryanized” a Jewish textile factory.
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“Alice Horáčková’s novel A House Divided is a suspenseful chronicle that takes your breath away. In Riesengebirge, Czech and German was spoken and the fates of families crossed, blended and collided. And all of that reverberates through this extraordinary book. Its title might evoke something broken, lost. But the reality of it is a complete opposite. Thanks to this extraordinary book, the broken past grows back into a whole again and gives us a three-dimensional and compact rendering of it.”
– Jaroslav Rudiš
“Inconspicuous, but grand and extraordinary – in the context of Czech literature decidedly so – story is related by Alice Horáčková in her new, voluminous novel A House Divided.”
– Irena Hejdová, Deník N
“First of all, A House Divided (…) is a totally captivating read, a grand family novel. If you were to read only one new Czech book, make it Alice Horáčková’s A House Divided.”
– Vogue
“The village novel A House Divided evokes the fate of a family, and the related stories of their neighbors and inhabitants of the Krkonoše Mountains, so suggestively that after completing the book my first question would be: Has anyone bought the film rights yet?
Alice Horáčková wrote a page-turner. She isn’t afraid of erotic scenes, even though at first they are a little tentative, as her heroines learn what it means to have a female body and to experience desire. And so after various embarrassing subterfuges we reach masterful descriptions of relationships free of hints, culminating with the relief-giving and direct: „Would you like to have a little fun with me?”
– Klára Kubíčková, Vlasta
“The novel is full of unusually human scenes and life paradoxes. The author tells her story in the form of a mosaic with the dynamics of a movie, keeping the reader in suspense until the very end. You read A House Divided with bated breath — this literary chronicle has a surprisingly contemporary feel. Human life is too fragile and too easily sacrificed by irresponsible politicians who strive to divide peoples that lived peacefully side by side for centuries.”
– František Cinger, Právo
