Ivan Klima has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as "a literary gem who
is too little appreciated in the West" and a "Czech master at the top of
his game." In No Saints or Angels, a Washington Post Best Book of 2001,
Klima takes us into the heart of contemporary Prague, where the
Communist People's Militia of the Stalinist era marches headlong into
the drug culture of the present. Kristyna is in her forties, the
divorced mother of a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, Jana. She is
beginning to love a man fifteen years her junior, but her joy is clouded
by worry -- Jana has been cutting school, and perhaps using heroin.
Meanwhile Kristyna's mother has forced on her a huge box of personal
papers left by her dead father, a tyrant whose Stalinist ideals she
despised. No Saints or Angels is a powerful book in which "Mr. Klima's
keen sense of history, his deep compassion for the ordinary people
caught up in its toils, and his abiding awareness of the fragility and
resilience of human life shine through.... Like Anton Chekhov, Mr. Klima
is a writer able to show us what's extraordinary about ordinary life."
(The Washington Times). "Ultimately, it's Prague, with its centuries of
glory and misery, that gives No Saints or Angels its humane power." --
Melvin Jules Bukiet, The Washington Post Book World" A compassionate
realist, [Klima] unflinchingly presents the problems facing modern
Prague and civilization in general ... [and] fills it with mercy." --
Jennie Yabroff, San Francisco Chronicle "Stirring and valuable." --
Jules Verdone, The Hartford Courant
