EDITIONS

Spanish

Jardín de invierno
Destino, Barcelona, 2009
Catalan
Jardí d’hivern
Proa, Barcelona, 2009
Czech
Zimní zahrada
Odeon, Praha, 2008

PRESS COMMENTS

“Works by authors such as the Hungarian Imre Kertész, the Romanian Norman Manea, the Pole Adam Zagajewski or the Czech Monika Zgustova, who has now reappeared with an excellent novel, ‘A Winter Garden’, deal with the disenchantment suffered by a generation of eternal dissidents and losers, experienced  moment by moment in a way that goes beyond temporary political events and given historical periods, with their respective hypocrisies and increasingly frequent turn coating.”
Mercedes Monmany, ABC

“A Winter Garden is an imposing novel which covers the last sixty years of the history of the Czech Republic. This work offers us various powerful contours to explore, which converge in a majestic arabesque to exalt the principal sources of moral integrity… A Winter Garden is a sumptuous work of jewellery, a beautiful swan song which transmits all the joy of pleasure, passion, plenitude and hope. The prodigious mood of isolation, full of human empathy, is reminiscent of Hrabal’s Too Loud A Solitude.”
Lluís Muntada, El País

“The scenes in A Winter Garden remind one of Milos Forman, and transmit a sensation of euphoric happiness. Here we have the little stories which form the basis of great novels, dealt with here better than they ever have been.”
Julià Guillamon, La Vanguardia

“A Winter Garden is an ambitious novel which looks at central issues concerning the human condition, such as death-in-life, the relationship with power, the struggle between culture and ideology, the fragmented nature of lived experience… A Winter Garden is so successful in terms of plot, structure, characters, setting, language etc., that the reader is seduced by the narrative art of the author and allows himself to be swept along without quite noticing the tremendous breadth of the conceptual power of this work.”
Sam Abrams, El Mundo

“One of the finest novels of the new millennium. A warm-hearted portrait of humanity in the atmosphere of an inhuman Prague in which only the music, poetry and flowers that come from within provide enough oxygen to allow people to breathe. All of this is narrated in a prose that is at once rich, cultured, tender and emotive. A literary jewel.”
Jordi Capdevila, Avui

“Without a doubt, Monika Zgustova is one of those writers who have something – and that is something in itself – to say. And, at times, we fear that the book might fall apart in our hands, so fragile it appears. But then her genius saves the day, and the book not only doesn’t disintegrate, it goes from strength to strength.”
Andrés Pau, Diario de Levante

“Whereas, in A Silent Woman, considered to be one of the five best books of 2005, evoked the life of an elderly woman, in A Winter Garden she relives the world that Tom Stoppard reflected in Rock’n’roll and Havel in his prison diaries.”
Sergi Doria, ABC

“Kundera’s main themes –lightness, absurdity – here acquire a feminine touch. As a whole, this book has an original consistency: light and airy, like a milkshake made of beautiful, homologous dreams. For the reader this is both a refreshing and a pleasant experience.”
Portál české literatury