The Warning

August 2022, 400 pages

An exploration of the psychology of one mother-daughter relationship

Is this a generational conflict, an issue characteristic of today’s deeply divided society, or a clash between faith and rationality? After losing their husbands, mother Jarka and daughter Karolína have had to find ways of coping with the death of a loved one. Intelligent Karolína tends to rationalize everything, yet she often unexpectedly succumbs to anger and other strong affects. Her mother, who is more attuned to emotion, strives to save Karolína from intellectual nihilism: in her view, the world can never be fully understood through reason only. An unhinged religious blogger who suddenly appears on the scene acts as the catalyst in a lab experiment, and the agents in the compound start reacting wildly. The mother thinks her daughter is losing her religion; the daughter thinks her mother is losing her mind, and both are fighting to save the other’s soul.