Czech edition: Nářek ženy
Czech edition: Příběh záporáka · illustration Jakub Dvořák
The books
Four books in Czech. The English shelf starts here.
Out now in English
No Bugger Lasts, Right
Five dark tales where love curdles into murder and the universe quietly settles its accounts.
Inside the book →
In translation
A Woman's Lament
A deeply personal account of her husband's illness and death, told in two voices.
Read the prologue →
Coming in English
The Antihero's Story (working title)
A political satire drawn from eight years inside a town council. Funnier than it should be. Truer than you'd like.
Follow for news →
Out now on Kindle
No Bugger Lasts, Right
Savagely funny one moment and unbearably tender the next, these five dark tales watch love curdle into murder, grief open a door to the uncanny, and the universe quietly settle its accounts.
Here are women who refuse to simply suffer, and men who learn, too late, that some debts always come due. For readers who like their horror with a laugh, and their laughs with a chill.
Two of these stories are drawn from real life. Which ones? That's for you to decide.
Translated from the Czech by Alžbeta Pavlicová.
Five stories
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Frank Has to Be Happy…
For over a year, Frank has been secretly skimming coins from his pension to buy fifty red roses for their golden wedding anniversary. Brenda, glued to the sofa with her crisps and her soap, has made most of those fifty years hell. It will be an anniversary nobody forgets.
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Love Beyond the Grave
Fourteen months after losing Luke, Clara still can't bring herself to turn over in bed. Now, night after night, he is calling her home. A modern retelling of The Wedding Shirt, the Gothic ballad that has terrified Czech schoolchildren since 1853.
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Luca Lues
Five years after throwing out her drunken husband, Monica asks life for just one more thing that will shake her to the core. A charming Italian stranger is about to give her far more than she bargained for.
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Take No Prisoners!
All Hedwig wants is a quiet sauna. What she gets is louts, lechers and, finally, the truth about exactly who her husband loves. Some doors are better left jammed.
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A Fairy Tale with a Happy Ending
For a lifetime, Joseph and Mary have read each other Ovid's tale of the lovers who died in the same hour. Old and ill, they now ask for only one thing: to go together.
Step inside. Just remember: no bugger lasts. Right?
Read a sample · Translation in progress
A Woman's Lament
The prologue
Everyone is afraid. Of some things more, of others less. Some people fear losing their job, fear infidelity, fear illness. It might equally be the fear of how quickly the years accumulate — the wrinkles, the weight, or the fact that your children will grow up, find their own way, and fly the nest. Some of those fears materialise over the years. Others don't.
But without exception, we all fear death.
Whose, though? There is more than one kind of death.
Am I most afraid of my own? Or my father's, my mother's, my husband's, my partner's, my daughter's, my son's? Every death touches us deeply, whether we want it to or not.
Selfishly, I've come to the conclusion that the most merciful death is the one that takes me. Although probably only if it's sudden and very quick.
But then — what about those we love who are left behind? That's not simple at all.
Which is perhaps why death — and love and hatred alongside it — have been for thousands of years the most enduring and fertile subjects for art.
Everyone dreams of love, because each of us believes and hopes that we will find the one — the destined one. And even if we don't, the longing alone — the longing that drives our hearts forward — is worth experiencing.
Death, on the other hand, is something nobody wants to think about. As though it didn't exist. As though it would never come. In our country this is compounded by the fact that we are — largely — a nation of atheists and unbelievers.
But let us not forget. It will come. Sooner or later, it comes for each and every one of us. Perhaps it would be rather good to stop fearing it and begin to think of it differently. As an ordinary part of our lives.
A personal experience — very painful — led me to write A Woman's Lament. But so that it would not be merely an ‘ordinary’ story of life and death, the book has two narrative threads, with the added bonus of a short but honest conversation — at times heavy, at times surprisingly light — with my very dear friend, a consultant psychiatrist. Is it hard to see and know that sometimes there is simply nothing you can do? And who has the hardest time of it?
I honestly couldn't say…
“What you are now, we once were. What we are now, you will be.”Inscription on a tombstone. Author unknown.
About the author
The champion who started writing in the dark.
Ivana H. Kozmin is a Czech writer of dark, darkly funny fiction about love, marriage and everything that goes wrong in between.
As a girl she heard her teacher read aloud Kytice, Karel Jaromír Erben's 1853 collection of Gothic ballads, and the tales terrified and fascinated her in equal measure. The fascination never left: she still reads crime and horror above everything else.
For years her life was movement. As an aerobics coach and choreographer she won two European and two World titles in aerobic show, and she still teaches aerobics, tabata and yoga.
She began writing during the pandemic, sending short stories about life to her friends. Their response led to her first book, a sharp, funny take on dating gone wrong. Since then she has written a political satire drawn from eight years as a town councillor, a deeply personal account of her husband's illness and death, and No Bugger Lasts, Right, her first book in English.
- 2×World champion, aerobic show
- 2×European champion
- 8years as a town councillor
- 4books in Czech
Readings & events
On stage and behind the scenes.
Follow Ivana
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New books, translations and the odd bedtime horror story.