Goya's Glass - Softcover

"For Zgustova and her triad of women, the experience of exile--so delicately rendered in Berberova's letters--is as palpable as the struggle to survive beneath the weight of a repressive regime, as documented in Nemcová's life story. Inhabiting the crossroad between history and imagination, Zgustova's new novel is a tantalizing and powerful effort." --Publishers Weekly

"A powerful testament to the determination of women to circumvent stifling societal strictures and boundaries." --Booklist

"Monika Zgustova's concerns are close to my own: the fate of the individual in the hands of totalitarianism. She is an outstanding writer, whose fiction invokes the politics and culture of people throughout history." --Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic

"Three centuries, three solitudes, three unbridled passions, three indomitable women--Monika Zgustova is a born storyteller. Goya's Glass is a magnificent achievement." --Josef Skvorecky, author of The Engineer of Human Souls

"The portraits of three women of different nationalities and centuries in Goya's Glass reveal a unique voice that owes as much to Kundera as to Flaubert, to Hasek as to Tolstoy. Monika Zgustova is a perfect example of a writer without borders, whose literary creations include the cultures and languages that she has accumulated throughout her lifetime." --Juan Goytisolo, author of Exiled from Almost Everywhere

The Duchess of Alba, known as Goya's muse, recalls the passions of youth on her deathbed in the royal court of eighteenth-century Madrid. A young woman defies the protocols of her arranged marriage and pursues love—and the life of a published writer—until her readers condemn her as a danger to society in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nina Berberova escapes persecution during the Russian Revolution and flees to Paris, where the intelligentsia naively covet the promise of a Soviet Union. These three women attempt to find passion and intimacy in worlds that rarely accommodate female desire. Goya's Glass is an unforgettable novel of guilty pleasures coursing through history.