Get your complimentary copy of The Last Bohemians

Until 25 October, when The Last Bohemians will go on Amazon Kindle exclusively (for three months), you can download a complimentary copy of the ebook.  

Go to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/335265  

and enter Coupon # SX46G.  

To express your delight in this remarkable offer, please feel free to write a brief review of what readers describe as a "beautifully capture[d] description of  post communist Europe in the mid-1990s" and "mystery [that] slowly builds as Sam investigates the corruption seeded into the growing democracy in the newly formed Czech Republic” 

on Smashwords and  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18192249-the-last-bohemians

I do look forward to your questions and comments.

The Čajovna

The čajovna, or tea-room, was becoming quite a phenomenon; there are almost as many tea rooms as beer halls in Prague now, I thought, as I followed him down the shadowy hall.... I caught the scent of some unfamiliar incense, just before he led me through a curtain of beads and down a narrow stone staircase. The walls were rough, ancient, and cold; I followed him around the spiral, hand on the rail for balance. When we reached the bottom, our steps went silent as we crossed a thick carpet. I realized that we were in the original sklep of the building; but the raw, usually unfinished cellar had been transformed with low tables, cushions and pillows, and raised platforms in the corners of the room. Another doorway to our left was also curtained by beads, and, I was sure, led to more rooms in the warren-like tea-room style.

– Chapter 3, "Děti Země", The Last Bohemians

Riding the trams of Prague:

The Prague tram network consists of 142.4 km (88.5 mi) of track, 972 trams, and 24 daytime routes and nine night routes with a total route length of 539.8 km (335.4 mi).   The system served 312.9 million passengers in 2011.  The first horsecar tram line was opened in 1875, and the first electric tram ran in 1891. - Dopravní podnik hl. m. Prahy. July 2012

I love the Prague trams.  My favourite tram has always been the #26 that (still) cuts right across the city from the northwest through the centre, all the way to the southeast corner.

It used to take me just over an hour, from the wild and legend-filled Divoká Šárka to the giant panelaky complex at Hostivař.  Past the charming bourgeois architecture of Dejvická, through the urban grit of hlavní nádraží and Žižkov, the creepy romance of(cemetary) and tidy suburb of Strašnice, the #26 reveals Prague’s many faces.  Wide tram windows, at perfect eye-level when you’re sitting down, provide a panoramic view; if you tilt and smudge your forehead against the glass, you can see all the way up the highest buildings with their baroque façades and Art Nouveau gargoyles.

In The Last Bohemians, Sam and researcher/translator Katka take a tram up to the landfill at Ďáblice:

"The tram rumbled around the corner of Na Poříčí and Revoluční, down the stretch to the Vltava. Though it was a chilly, blustery day outside, a bright spring sun poured through the wide windows, warming my cold hands as they gripped the stand-up passenger bar; at Dlouhá třída, a middle-aged couple sitting in front of us got off. We slid quickly into their seats, and I experienced one of the small luxuries of the freezing Prague winter: heated tram seats.

‘Ah-h-h-h,’ I sighed with pleasure and squirmed around to get the full sensation. The heat travelled down my thighs to my knees and up the small of my back. Katka pursed her lips in annoyance – only one in every three seats was heated, so she was sitting on cold ordinary plastic. It felt snug in the warm tram with the bright but cold day outside; small columns of mist rose up from the river as I looked, as I always did, at the white-water careening down the rocks of the dam on one side; on the other, fog caressed the spires of St Vitus Cathedral and the castle towering up on the hill.”

Back in the 90s, most trams were that soot-­‐stained rusty red-­and-­white that you still see today; by the end of the decade, however, the Prague Dopravní podnik (transport company) had begun to sell advertising so occasionally we were surprised by brightly painted submarine-­‐shaped cars gliding past:

In 2010, the city of Prague introduced the new, hyper-modern trams that wouldn’t look out of place in a Ridley Scott or George Lucas film.  These sleek machines, designed and built by Czech automaker Škoda, have even wider windows with central heat and comfy, colourful padded seats.

Instead of the jerky stop-starts and ear-piercing squeals around corners, these new trams are smooth and almost silent—they, as much as anything else, may be harbingers of Prague’s progress into the 21^st century. 

The old trams are still around, sturdy as Tonka toys and charming as ever.  In addition to being a testimony to Czech workmanship, they also foster my nostalgia—and that, perhaps, of others, who knew them well back in the 90s.

Zlate mesto (Golden city) of Prague

This is my writer's blog--because I am a writer and it is my blog, it is by definition a writer's blog.  But I will almost certainly go off on tangents that other, less forgiving (some might even say pedantic, but, being myself the quintessential pedant, I never would) bloggers and critics would frown upon.

 

Right now, however, the purpose of this blog is to promote my new book, my first book, and, in the words of my Southern dysfunctional family, "my only precious baby chile", The Last Bohemians (hence TLB).

 

Here is a picture of the book: 

 

Here is a picture of me:

I am currently in Prague, where TLB is set.  The next week or two, I will be blogging about my adopted city and how it has changed (or not) from its depiction in the book.  I hope you will follow me (if you have been to Prague or even if you haven't) whether or not  you were part of that Narnian time rebirthed a new Bohemia with an international cast of characters into the Left Bank of the 90s.