The Sorrowful Putto of Prague  

by James Stafford, AJ Bernardo, Raluca Moldovan, Lenka Šimečková, Josel Nicolas

May 2017, 152 pages

Available material: English original

A beguiling, dark and charming set of short tales that blend black humour, tragedy, melancholy, hope and beauty together whilst hitting every note perfectly.

This collection of stories about ‘Xavier of the Sorrowful Snows’ has won acclaim from such diverse sources as Hollywood and comic legend Samuel L Jackson, to the Guardian newspaper and the cream of the Czech print and broadcast press. Xavier is a contradictory hero: a baroque angel born into the Renaissance; a being with the face of a child and the bitter wisdom of an old man; a tender lover, a fierce fighter and a hopeless drunk. Above all, he’s a devoted, if reluctant, defender of Prague. The individual chapters of his adventure take us back to the times of emperor Rudolf or the Baroque era, as well as to the present day; featuring tales of the political purges of the 1950s and the secret police of the “normalisation” period. Characters include the famous Golem (as you’ve never seen him before), a zombie version of a Czech patron saint, corrupt Prague taxi drivers and miraculous visions of the talking head of St. Adalbert in the middle of the working class Žižkov district of Prague. In short, The Sorrowful Putto of Prague offers such a bizarre mix of historical realia, fantastic tales, the genius loci of Prague, black humour (both typically British and typically Czech) and pop-culture references that after reading it you’ll will never quite see the City of a Hundred Spires the same way again.