We Saw Each Other Better in the Darkness

Shortlisted for the Literary Thursday Award (Literární čtvrtek, Czech Republic) 2022.

EDITIONS
Spanish
Nos veíamos mejor en la oscuridad
Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona, 2022
Catalan
Ens vèiem millor en la foscor
Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona, 2022
Czech
Potmě jsme se viděli lépe
Argo, Praha, 2022

 

BLURBS – SPANISH PRESS

A book about mothers and daughters that in the end is a book, as so often with this writer, about exile. About the lack and beauty of the roots. About security, about work, independence, the need for family and its obligations. A book with a great biographical character that is not a biography. A book that reconciles us with the intimate life in spite of distances, airplanes, borders and even the history that disperses us. A book to treasure in your heart.
Isabel Sánchez, Salamanca al día

This is Monika Zgustova’s most personal work, a splendid novel that speaks of the senselessness of totalitarianism.
Eva Cosculluela, ABC Cultural

Zgustova is a key figure in the introduction of Czech literature in the Spanish-speaking world.
Javier Nogueira, Diario de Pontevedra

The writer, journalist and translator of Czech origin who has lived in Barcelona for four decades immerses herself with all its literary consequences in a complicated maternal or filial relationship marked forever by the forced exile to which both were forced after the irruption of a totalitarian satrapy.
Natalio Blanco, Diario 16

Monika Zgustova is one of those people who go through events with the ability to transmit that they are the ones that transform her but do not deform her.
Zgustova narrates with amenity, lightness of spirit, soulful depth and luminous resolution; everything that comes with leaving a country obliged to do so, as is happening now in Eastern Europe.
Pedro Bosqued, Heraldo de Aragón

In her latest novel, Nos veíamos mejor en la oscuridad, the Czech-Spanish author recalls her own family’s exile after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Inevitable parallels with the current Ukrainian situation.
Gloria Aznar, Diario de Tarragona

Her splendidly written stories are penetrated, like her own life, by the traumatic experience of forced emigration.
Isabel Vargas, El Español

As in the rest of her already extense literary work, Zgustova once again explores family ties and the disastrous traces of totalitarianism. It is a fictitious but absolutely plausible story that connects with the biography of the author herself, “a stranger everywhere: in Chicago, in Barcelona and in Prague”.
Javier Menéndez Llamazares, El diario montañés

The experience of totalitarianism, which her own mother suffered, is one of the constant themes in all her books. It also appears in ‘Nos veíamos mejor en la oscuridad’, his most autobiographical novel, in which he recounts the relationship of a mother and daughter who were marked by exile and flight from their country forty years ago.
Rosa M. Ruiz, El diario montañés

Monika Zgustova offers us in this novel the reconstruction of a story that seems autobiographical; through the senses, the taste of lemon, the smell of cinnamon or certain sounds, the narrator evokes fragments of memory that make up the development of her life. They are vivid memories, seasoned with nostalgia, grief or rage, due to which those of us who read them experience them affectively.
M.Suárez Lafuente, El periódico de Aragón/ April Supplement, El periódico de España